The new AMD Radeon RX 6400 represents the lowest level of performance of the RX 6000 series with RDNA 2 architecture. It is intended for those players who are satisfied with basic features for 1080p resolution in medium and high quality, being an interesting approach due to its format Low and narrow profile.After the bad sensations that the RX 6500 XT model left in terms of performance/price, this 6400 could be a more interesting option for less than €200, offering figures around 60 FPS with a good CPU in high quality, with Ray Tracing capacity , in addition to Smart Access Memory.Let's see where it ranks, comparing it to the next higher model and the Intel ARC A380.We thank AMD for their trust in us for sending us this graphics card for review.We made a brief Unboxing of this small AMD Radeon RX 6400 card, which arrives in a flexible cardboard box where the color presentation and specifications of it are shown.Inside we have a second rigid cardboard box type case where it is safely stored between cardboard and foam molds.The contents of the box will be as follows:Among the designs proposed for the AMD Radeon RX 6400, this specific model of Sapphire Pulse RX 6400 will not be the most epic, as we find other options with dual fans and 2 slots such as the Asus Dual RX 6400. What we do have is the advantage with This model or the XFX version is that it only occupies 1 slot in thickness, and can even be installed in SFX or NAS chassis as it is compatible with 70 mm slots and standard ATX format.The heatsink of this model is presented to us in the form of a single block made of aluminum, revealing part of the PCB where the ports and elements of the VRM are located.However at the other end the heatsink protrudes exactly 18mm from the PCB to extend its cooling capacity.It integrates a small 50mm axial fan with embedded “Pulse” logo, double ball bearings and zero rpm mode.Obviously it will be a completely silent graphics card with its tiny fan, being an advantage for towers intended for productivity, Mini PC or NAS.The heatsink has been decorated with a black rigid plastic cover with distinctive red lines of the brand.By having fins in a longitudinal configuration, the air will be expelled both from the rear and the front towards the slot itself.The upper part of the PCB does not have any type of protection.The port configuration of this AMD Radeon RX 6400 is everything that can be expected with:Be careful not to underestimate this card, which, as a good member of the RDNA 2 family, is capable of reaching 8K@120 Hz DSC resolutions thanks to the HDMI 2.1 port, or 4K@144 Hz with both ports.Another interesting news for its installation in low consumption equipment is that it does not have any type of power header other than the PCIe x16 interface itself, as it has a TBP of 53W.Interface that will only use 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, while the other 12 will remain unused except for the power one.We have already seen the heatsink, so we go directly to the analysis of the components and features of the AMD Radeon RX 6400, which is presented as the card belonging to the RDNA 2 architecture with less power.It's not going to be a throwaway card for that, and we'll look at where it stands in terms of performance/price compared to the RX 6500 XT.Its chipset based on a 6nm Navi 24 manufacturing process has 5.4 billion transistors, offering a ridiculous consumption of only 53W in TBP (Total Board Power), which makes an external power header unnecessary.For this, Sapphire has only used two power supply phases with MOSFETS ON Semiconductor NCP302045 of 75A, together with a controller of the same brand, model NCP81022N.The second model to release the 6nm manufacturing process has a chipset made up of 12 computing units inside which we have 12 RT Cores for ray tracing and 768 Transmission Processors or Shaders.All this adds up to 48 TMU or texture units and 32 ROP or raster units.It has a capacity of 3.57 TFLOPS in FP32 and 74.27 GPixel/s in pixel fill speed, working at a boost frequency of 2321 MHz.This implies that, despite being the low-end model, it supports hardware Ray Tracing, in addition to the rest of the functions of Radeon Software Drivers such as FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR.However, there are also important absences such as VP9, ​​H.264 and H.265 encoding, since it is incompatible with them.In fact it can decode, but not encode, being an impediment for content creators.We turn to the characteristics of the dedicated VRAM memory, which has a capacity of 4 GB with GGDR6-type chips from the manufacturer Micron.These are placed on a 64-bit bus, so each chip provides 2 GB of capacity and 32 bits of bus.They thus add a bandwidth of 128 GB / s thanks to operating at a clock frequency of 2000 MHz or what is the same, effective 16 Gbps.The memory levels below it consist of 16 MB Infinity Cache and 1 MB L2 cache.It will support the Smart Access Memory (SAM) function, to share VRAM memory with the CPU to speed up data transfer and improve performance in certain tasks on current Intel and AMD platforms, although here you will not notice any difference.The time has come to carry out the performance tests under the same conditions as the rest of the graphics cards, firstly using the Intel test bench with the following components:Intel Core i9-10850KG.Skill Trident Z Royal RGB 16GB @3600MHzCorsair H100i RGB Platinum SEThe tests have been carried out with the default configuration of each program.We have run all of them on Windows 11 Pro and AMD Radeon Software drivers version 22.5.1.The playability of a graphics card could be assessed in the following steps according to the framerate it delivers:For the benchmark tests we will use the following synthetic tests:As usual, AMD cards show a good performance in Fire Strike (DirectX 11), but the tests of Time Spy (DirectX 12) continue to choke, and the Intel ARC A380 beats it in this section.In the others, the RDNA 2 card is shown to be superior to this and the Nvidia GTX 1650.The time has come to evaluate this AMD Radeon RX 6400 in terms of performance in games in Full HD (1920x1080p) and 2K (2560 x 1440p) resolutions, suppressing 4K because it does not make sense to use it for this resolution.The performance in games only put it above the Nvidia GTX 1650 and the Intel ARC A380, occasionally it exceeds the 1650 Super and RX 5500 XT, but we can consider it below these two in general.Performance at 2K can be higher than 30 FPS, but it's clearly a 1080p-only card, where it'll be relatively comfortable at medium and sometimes high quality.We remember that all our tests are carried out in high quality.The last graph will be quite revealing when comparing the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 6400 with the RX 6500 XT in Full HD resolution, which will later help us determine which of the two options is the best in price performance.To give you an idea, with the same CPU, the RX 6500 XT is on average 38.6% higher than the RX 6400.Below we will test performance with games by enabling ray tracing and FSR when possible:As expected, this card is not an option to play with Ray Tracing activated unless they are Indie games with low graphics, since 1080p + FSR will give us a very poor image quality.We have tested its performance with the Blender 2.9 environment and The Junk Shop project using the OpenCL engine under Cycles.We run the AMD Radeon RX 6400 at maximum capacity for several hours using FurMark and HWiNFO software to view telemetry.With a wattmeter the power of all the complete equipment has been measured, except the monitor.The ambient temperature in the room will be 24oC.With this minimum heatsink that this model has, we have obtained slightly elevated temperatures at maximum stress, but controlled at all times at 70ºC using 62% of the fan's power, which would be about 3650 rpm.Consumption is the lowest in the table under stress at just 113W with full GPU only, and 259W with full GPU and CPU.It means that with a 350W power supply we will have more than enough in a hypothetical low/medium range setup with this graphics card.It alone consumes 2W at rest and 43W under stress, being well below the power that the PCIe interface can supply, so in terms of efficiency it will be a marvel.We now move on to testing the same games and programs on the AMD platform with a Ryzen 9 5900X and Intel platform with a Core i9-12900K enabling Resizable-BAR/Smart Access Memory technology on both.The test benches are made up of:G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 16GB @3600MHzIntel Core i9-12900KThe tests leave us with extremely similar measurements on both CPUs, both in 1080p and 2K, although the Intel processor always manages to get a few more FPS in the lower resolution.However, both will be processors where the use of the RX 6400 makes little sense, since for price they belong to another category entirely.AMD makes available to users with a tighter budget a graphics card capable of running high-quality games in FHD with relative ease.However, its ideal configuration will be medium quality in triple A games and high quality for certain titles and mainly Indies.Despite supporting ray tracing, we can rarely afford it, although it is totally logical.By belonging to the RDNA 2 architecture we will have all the functions implicit in it and the drivers, for example SAM, super resolution, FSR, etc.But an important detail such as VP9, ​​H.264 and H.265 encoding has been left out, since it is incompatible with it, and they are only supported in decoding mode.Here is the guide with the best graphics cards on the marketThere will be two positive aspects that we have seen in this card: firstly, its tiny size with a narrow 1-slot heatsink, which can be part of a Mini PC, SFX tower or even a NAS to provide real-time transcoding.The second is the ridiculous consumption of the GPU, only 43W, requiring small and basic power supplies, and thus being able to build a PC for very little money.Now comes a notable disadvantage, and that is the power/price ratio, finding the cheapest XFX model at €158 on Amazon, while this review exceeds €200.Going back to the graphics comparison between the AMD Radeon RX 6400 and the AMD RX 6500 XT, we saw that the average difference in performance was 38.6%.The cheapest 6500 XT is at €198 at the moment, being only 25% more expensive than the RX 6400, which means that it has a worse price/power ratio, so it has to drop even more in price to be competitive.We believe that for now, it is not an attractive option.The professional review gives it the silver medal:Last updated on 2022-08-31The AMD Radeon RX 6400 needs to drop more in price to be competitive, with clear advantages such as consumption or size, but also limitations despite being the most basic of its rangeIn Professional Review you will find all the most interesting analyses, news and tutorials.Specialists in hardware, PC configurations, peripherals, software, smartphones and any technological product that we see interesting.Join our community!