According to Tom's Hardware the card is a Frankenstein's monster, splicing bits from the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 using 2022's Navi 24 (codename Beige Goby). The full-fat 1,024 streaming processors get throttled so hard the GPU ends up sipping just 55W of power—massively undercutting the 107W RX 6500 XT. Zephyr's blower-style RX 6500LP clocks in at a base 1,728 MHz and boost 2,066 MHz, roughly 25 per cent and 27 per cent slower than the XT variant.

While it looks like a halfway house, Zephyr’s RX 6500 might fill a tiny, sad niche in today's GPU market.

What’s more damning is that the Radeon RX 580, which came out when Theresa May was still prime minister, is still hanging around for $139 (€130). That’s a whole eight years of stubborn relevance for a card that launched at $229 (€215). If you look on eBay you can find one for about $64 (€60), assuming you don’t mind a bit of thermal paste archaeology.

To be fair, the Radeon RX 6500 has more up-to-date hardware than a Radeon RX 580, thus providing access to AMD's newer gaming features. The Navi 24 graphics card also consumes less power and runs cooler than a Radeon RX 580.

The Radeon RX 6500 keeps the same anaemic 4GB of GDDR6 memory seen in its siblings, running at 16 Gbps over a 64-bit interface. That nets a modest 128 GB/s memory bandwidth, and makes this card strictly small form factor fodder—great for low-end prebuild upgrades, less so for modern games asking for double the VRAM.

If common sense still applied to GPU pricing, $149 (€139) would be the absolute limit for this RX 6500 zombie—given that's where a brand-new RX 6500 XT starts. But the market’s a clown car these days. So, there is no price yet, release date, or great expectations.