AMD’s launch of the Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card earlier this year was a complete mess. The card was initially launched to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in the mid-range graphics card space, but Nvidia then countered by lowering the price on its RTX 2060 Founder’s Edition to the magic $299 price point (so far, availability has been very limited though).
In response, AMD announced a new vBIOS for the RX 5600 XT that would increase the memory speed from 12,000 MHz (effective) to 14 Gbps, and also shift the boost clock upwards from 1620 MHz to 1750 MHz. All in all, this put the RX 5600 XT on par with the RTX 2060 in terms of gaming performance – and interestingly also quite close to AMD’s own higher-end RX 5700.
Unfortunately, the new memory speeds announced by AMD quickly ran into trouble. MSI, for example, claimed that they could not guarantee that the high frequencies would work flawlessly on all Radeon RX 5600 XT cards since many GDDR6 modules were specified to run at 12,000 MHz.
ASRock didn’t make much noise initially during the messy GPU launch, but now the company announces official BIOS updates to bring its RX 5600 XT cards in line with AMD’s recommended memory frequencies. This is a quick way to greatly improve gaming performance with the help of validated GDDR6 frequencies of 14,000 MHz.
New BIOS files are available for the entire ASRock RX 5600 XT lineup, including the Phantom Gaming D3 6G OC, Phantom Gaming D2 6G OC, and the RX Challenger D 6G OC graphics cards, all of which will support 14 Gbps memory speeds and higher GPU clock speeds of up to 1750 MHz.
Head of to the individual product pages for the respective ASRock graphics cards to get your new BIOS and the improved gaming performance that comes with it.
