Modder blows up AMD’s RX 5600 XT with 16 GB memory and 256-bit bus width

TomsHardware reported on YouTuber and modder Paulo Gnomes, who carried out an extreme memory modification with an RX 5600 XT Red Devil. He increased the memory capacity of the card from 6 GB to 16 GB and increased the memory bandwidth to 256 bits. In combination with manual overclocking, the RX 5600 XT Red Devil achieved a performance increase of 29% compared to the standard configuration.

Until now, Paulo has never combined a memory bus modification with memory capacity expansions. According to his videos, it was particularly difficult to unlock the bus width. First, he had to modify the BIOS of the RX 5600 XT to customize the hexadecimal code that instructs the GPU to unlock the additional memory controllers in the Navi 10 Die. After finding the correct code, he had to find a compatible BIOS from another Navi 10 GPU and transfer it to the Red Devil. The default BIOS provided poor benchmark results, but another BIOS worked flawlessly and restored performance.

With these modifications, Paulo has basically turned the RX 5600 XT into a Radeon Pro RX 5700 XT. The Radeon Pro 5700 XT uses the same Navi 10 die, but has a 256-bit bus and 16 GB of memory by default. If Paulo could unlock shader cores, he could increase the 5600 XT’s core count from 2,304 to 2,560. However, this is not yet possible with modern GPUs. In Unigine Superposition, the standard RX 5600 XT achieved 3,944 points. With the memory modifications, the performance increased by 11% to 4,387 points. Overclocking took the score to 5,115 points, an impressive increase of almost 30%.

Although Paulo did not test the card in games with more than 6 GB of VRAM, the Superposition benchmarks show the importance of memory bus width. Such a modification is rather impractical, especially with a mid-range GPU from earlier years. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see how far you can push a GPU with modifications.

More details:

• Modder: Paulo Gnomes
• GPU: AMD RX 5600 XT Red Devil
• Memory expansion: 6 GB to 16 GB
• Memory bandwidth: 192 bit to 256 bit
• Performance increase: 29% (Unigine Superposition)
• Challenge: Unlocking the bus width and BIOS customization

Source: TomsHardware, YouTube