AMD quietly launches Radeon 600 Series graphics cards

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It’s not the sort of thing to grab big headlines but AMD has quietly launched its AMD Radeon 600 Series graphics card. We’re all preoccupied with the Radeon RX 5700 family, of course, yet AMD can’t go forgetting about the lower end of the GPU market.

In truth, the AMD Radeon 600 Series isn’t the most exciting of launches. It would appear it’s just a rebranding of the Radeon 500 Series, specifically geared towards system builders who want their rigs to look all shiny and new.

The graphics cards which are being refreshed for the new series are all on the lower end of the scale as well. The most powerful announced Radeon 600 Series GPU is the AMD Radeon RX 640. It’s not often such a low-end graphics card could find itself at the top of a performance list.

AMD’s remaining Radeon 600 graphics cards comprise the AMD Radeon 630, AMD Radeon 625, AMD Radeon 620, and AMD Radeon 610.

It doesn’t look as if you’re going to be able to buy any of these graphics cards off the shelf. They’re heading out to OEMs so it would appear they’re going to be in low-end pre-built systems only.

Specs-wise, these new graphics cards are largely identical to what’s come before, albeit with some shifting around and rebranding. The Radeon RX 640 appears to be a rebranded Radeon RX 550 and 550X, for example. One area they do appear to have suffered is the memory interface. The Radeon RX 640 uses a narrow 64-bit memory bus compared to 128-bit on the RX 550. This brings the maximum memory bandwidth crashing down from 112 GB/s to just 56 GB/s.

If you’re looking at buying a new PC, based on the specs we’d almost certainly recommend you stay well away from the Radeon 600 Series. You’d be better off picking up an RX 500 GPU or shopping around for a faster second-hand model.