Introduction

We have with us the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle, a premium custom-design graphics card based on AMD's latest mid-range GPU. The RX 6600 (non-XT) is designed for 1080p gaming with maximum settings, and meets the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set. Gigabyte's value-addition comes in the form of a large, premium-looking dual-slot cooling solution. The RX 6600 shares the 7 nm Navi 23 silicon with the RX 6600 XT launched this August, but is slightly cut down to bring down prices. The card could appeal to the e-sports gaming crowd that's playing at 1080p.



AMD carved the Radeon RX 6600 out of the Navi 23 silicon by disabling 4 out of 32 compute units physically present, resulting in 1,792 stream processors, 28 Ray Accelerators, 112 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory size is unchanged at 8 GB, as is the memory type—GDDR6 across a 128-bit wide memory bus. The memory data-rate is lower, at 14 Gbps, compared to 16 Gbps on the RX 6600 XT, resulting in memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s. AMD's innovation in the memory space with this generation is Infinity Cache, a fast on-die L3 cache memory that cushions data transfers between GPU and memory. For the RX 6600, the same 32 MB Infinity Cache is used as on the RX 6600 XT.

The RX 6600 is based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the rest of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, which has propelled the company back to competitiveness across all consumer graphics market segments, including the enthusiast segment. This is AMD's first architecture that features real-time ray tracing hardware acceleration. Fixed function hardware called Ray Accelerators perform the most compute-intensive part of the ray tracing pipeline (ray intersection calculations), while much of the other ray tracing pipeline is handled by compute shaders. A consequence of this is that AMD has had to significantly increase throughput of its SIMD machinery through not just IPC increases of the RDNA2 compute unit, but also significant increases in engine clocks. This is what makes the RX 6600 an interesting mid-range card for the 1080p crowd.

The Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle features a large WindForce 3X cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's fed heat by three copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base. This heatsink is ventilated by three 100 mm fans. The card is longer than the PCB itself, which means much of the airflow from the third fan goes right through the heatsink and out the backplate from a large cutout. Just like all other RX 6600 cards on the market, the Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle in this review ticks at AMD reference speeds—no overclocked variants are available at this time. AMD originally designed the RX 6600 to undercut NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 at a lower price. In this review, we find out if the GPU is able to meet that goal with much better cooling.