Plans come and go in PC hardware—some turn into shipping product, others get scrunched up and thrown in the bin marked “cba”. Let’s hope these two recently rumoured graphics cards come under the former, as we could do with some fresh cards under $260.
According to known leaker komachi_ensaka on X, AMD has referenced two new graphics cards: the Radeon RX 7400 and RX 7300. We don’t know where they’ve appeared, or really much more about them at all, though they’d be an unexpected development in a GPU generation we’d thought until now was all wrapped up.
The cheapest 7000-series graphics card available today is the RX 7600, though the last one to be announced was the RX 7600 XT back in January. That’s effectively the same card as the RX 7600, using the same Navi 33 GPU, except now with 16 GB of mostly pointless memory.
The RX 7400 and RX 7300 would allegedly use the same Navi 33 GPU as the RX 7600 XT. That means 2,048 cores is the absolute maximum configuration available with that GPU, along with a 128-bit bus. We should obviously expect much fewer cores than that in either RX 7400 or RX 7300, however, as the RX 7600 XT and RX 7600 already use the GPU’s full complement.
Videocardz suspects some rather small GPUs could be on the way, as the only competition to either card is AMD’s RX 6000-series, which has teeny tiny core counts. The RX 6400 has only 768, and the RX 6500 XT just 1,024. We could see something similar out of these new cards, alongside a slim memory bus, and it would still be an improvement just for the shift in architecture from RDNA 2 to RDNA 3.
The main thing is AMD being capped on price here. The RX 7600 is a $269 card, often even $250, and presumably such meagre core counts would see the RX 7400 and RX 7300 drop down to below $200 at least. That might not seem like a great deal to some but we’re talking about discrete options where there currently are few, and that can be handy at times.
Nvidia doesn’t bother with the ultra-low-end anymore, though Intel has a handful of ageing Alchemist-generation GPUs in this sort of price region, such as the Arc A580 and A380.
The arrival of impressive iGPUs on chips such as the Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G, and very recent Ryzen AI 300-series ‘Strix Point’ chips make a super-budget GPU a harder recommendation. If you need discrete for some reason, I get it, though you can grab a 768-core or 512-core RDNA 3 GPU with either desktop APU.
The 1,024-core GPU inside the laptop-focused HX 370, the Radeon 890M, would be even better in a desktop APU form factor, though no such AM5 chip exists today. But just know there are other options beyond ultra-budget discrete cards if you’re on a tight budget, with more likely to come.