ASUS Reloads AMD Polaris 12 into new ASUS Phoenix 550 card

Man, AMD's Polaris has had a long run (and many names) alright. Plenty of you guys still use a 580 or RX 480 released back in what was it 2016? Clearly it's still a viable series and as such ASUS might have figured they'd release a Radeon 550 graphics cards, Polaris based. 

The GPU that will empower the Radeon 550 will be Polaris 12 to be precise. It has 512 active shader cores and thus 8 CUs, and yes that is entry-level performance. So far, it all feels familiar. 

Now you might be saying or having a 2017 flashback and are saying, hey I noticed this product series before. And that is correct but was labeled as Phoenix RX 550 with that AREZ sticker however, ASUS has changed the specification a bit from that 2 and/or 4GB GDDR5 / 128-bit / 7 Gbps model. The new version from Asus, does not have faster, but slower graphics memory running at 6 Gbps, and it gets worse, the memory bus now is 64-bits wide  ... tied to all 2 GB of GDDR5. A distinction needs to be made, ASUS removed the RX suffix from the name. So it's not Radeon RX 550 but rather Radeon 550. 

SKU	Name	GPU	memory	memory bus
PH-RX550-4G-EVO	Phoenix Radeon RX 550 4GB GDDR5	AMD Radeon RX 550	4GB GDDR5	128-bit
PH-RX550-2G-EVO	Phoenix Radeon RX 550 2GB GDDR5	AMD Radeon RX 550	2GB GDDR5	128-bit
PH-550-2G (new)	Phoenix Radeon 550 2GB GDDR5	AMD Radeon 550	2GB GDDR5	64-bit

Yeah, we cannot really see the new RX 550 as a great successor, contrary as the new memory configuration is seriously going to slow down and already relatively slow performing graphics card. We think it has been an OEM version that finally hits retail hopefully at dirt cheap prices, as this is APU performance really.  However, if you are in the market for something like this, keep in mind that the more powerful model to purchase has RX in it.