AMD Radeon RX 6400 On Linux

The Radeon RX 6400 is sufficient enough for basic desktop use and other light rendering work on the GPU -- including for 2D work accelerated by GLAMOR on Linux. Its low-profile design makes it appealing for 2U and mini-ITX builds or with some after-market passive cooling if desired. It works fine for those use-cases but don't expect much out of the performance -- unless you are buying it for the small size, you are better off going for the Radeon RX 6500 XT for ~$199 instead. That's the reason I picked up this XFX Radeon RX 6400 was needing another low-profile PCIe card for use in 2U micro-ATX rackmount servers namely for display purposes during OS installs, etc. The Radeon RX 6400 at $159+ is rather pricey but unfortunately an artifact of today's environment.

Due to hardware or driver shortcomings, GPU power consumption monitoring with the AMDGPU Linux driver doesn't work for Beige Goby. In terms of the thermal performance for the XFX Speedster RX 6400, during the range of benchmarks carried out the RX 6400 had an average core temperature of 45 Celsius and peaked at 74 but the vast majority of the time was around 55 degrees or less.

The main takeaway for this article is that the Radeon RX 6400 does indeed work out-of-the-box on Linux with fully open-source drivers. It's a "Beige Goby" GPU so you should be good to go if running a modern Linux distribution and looking at the RX 6400 for its low-profile, single-slot designs or just needing a basic graphics card for an accelerated desktop and other basic use-cases. Don't expect to do any serious modern gaming on the RX 6400 but can run basic Vulkan compute tasks, 2D / desktop rendering, WebGL, and older open-source games well. It's at least much better off than the many HD 5450 and GT 710 era cards that are still floating around due to their low-power, low-profile designs. And thanks to AMD's fully open-source Linux driver stack, the Radeon RX 6400 will continue receiving driver support and improvements over the long-term.