Thursday, May 25th 2023
ASRock Also Launches the Radeon RX 6650 XT Steel Legend
ASRock earlier today debuted its Steel Legend brand in the graphics card market with the Radeon RX 7600 Steel Legend OC. The company also updated its previous-generation product stack with the Radeon RX 6650 XT Steel Legend. This card looks visually identical to the RX 7600 Steel Legend, since it uses the exact same cooling solution, but is based on the older RX 6650 XT GPU based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. ASRock has given this card a factory-overclock among its RX 6650 XT series, with a boost clock of 2669 MHz vs. 2635 MHz reference.
The RX 6650 XT Steel Legend targets white-themed PC builds, where its white cooler-shroud, frosty fan impellers, and white+silver backplate should complement builds with motherboards from ASRock's Steel Legend series. Each of the three fans in the Steel Legend cooler has RGB LED illumination. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. The company didn't reveal pricing, but given that prices of the RX 6650 XT have slipped to around $235, one can expect this card to retail for at least $40 less than the RX 7600 Steel Legend.
The RX 6650 XT Steel Legend targets white-themed PC builds, where its white cooler-shroud, frosty fan impellers, and white+silver backplate should complement builds with motherboards from ASRock's Steel Legend series. Each of the three fans in the Steel Legend cooler has RGB LED illumination. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. The company didn't reveal pricing, but given that prices of the RX 6650 XT have slipped to around $235, one can expect this card to retail for at least $40 less than the RX 7600 Steel Legend.
13 Comments on ASRock Also Launches the Radeon RX 6650 XT Steel Legend
Quietest solution would be a decent cooler design with 4-5 heatpipes and a 120x25 fan. And then you wouldn't need the card to be so long either.
The amount of surface area for 2-3 fans is far higher than a single fan. Larger surface area for both Heatsink & fan will make it quitter be by having a large volume of air flow at lower rpms.
I used this on a 200W card (HD6950), with a Noctua NF-P12 zip tied to the heatsink:
www.fudzilla.com/20999-scythe-setsugen-2-shows-off
The same setup also worked on my RX580 and kept it at ~70C at most, while being way quieter than the factory cooler (I think it was a Sapphire Pulse).
That was with a single fan, with the card being 2.5 slots high, and the card did not need to be as long as a full sized ISA card. Now imagine if it was big enough to hold two fans.
Only problem is that modern cards put the memory slots so close to the mounting positions, that you can't put big enough heatsinks on the memory to use a cooler like this.
Current cards just have horrible, inefficient designs (they waste both space and thermals), so they need triple coolers and 3 slots to keep the card cool, that's all. But it's the only thing available at the chinese OEMs, so it's what they use on every card.