AMD Radeon RX 5500M vs AMD Radeon RX 6800S

AMD Radeon RX 5500M

The AMD Radeon RX 5500M (or RX 5500 Mobile Graphics) is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 1,408 cores clocked at 1,645 MHz (max. Boost, 1448 MHz max game clock) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (14 Gbps).

The Navi 14 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the RX5500M should be between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and the normal GeForce GTX 1660 Ti according to AMD. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) with high or maximum settings in demanding games. AMD states that the 5500M should be able to hit a performance of up to 4,6 TFLOPS (theoretical) versus 5,2 (+12%) of the desktop Radeon 5500. In our gaming benchmarks with the MSI Alpha 15, the RX 5500M however was slightly slower on average than the older GTX 1060 (mobile) and therefore between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

The chip is specified with a TDP of 85 Watt and therefore 20 Watt more than the slower clocked Radeon RX5300M. In games the power consumption of the chip ranges between 64 and 105 Watt (Ghost Recon gameplay recorded with HWInfo64). In the MSI Alpha 15 the power consumption was clearly higher than the GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and only slightly below a normal GTX 1660 Ti (measured in The Witcher 3 with an external monitor).

AMD Radeon RX 6800S

The AMD Radeon RX 6800S is a mobile high-end graphics card for gaming laptops. It uses the Navi 23 chip based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. It uses all 2,048 shaders (= 32 CUs), 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs and therefore is similar to the desktop Radeon RX 6700 XT. The 128 Bit memory system connects 8 GB GDDR6 with 2 GHz memory clock. Furthermore, the RX6800S includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. The RX 6800S is the power saving variant of the RX 6800M and features slower clock speeds and a lower TDP.

Due to the lower clock speed, the performance should be lower than the RX 6800M. AMD specified the performance between the low power variants of the RTX 3070 (80-100W) and RTX 3080 (80-100W, former Max-Q).

The Navi 22 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process. Thanks to the reduced TDP, the 6800S is suited for thin gaming laptops.