AMD Radeon RX 6600

[roadie]

I've ordered the PowerColor Hellhound version of this card to replace my ASUS Strix RX 480. I was undecided between that card and the Sapphire Pulse version, but that went out of stock extremely quickly, likely because it was £300 instead of £330. With the state of the market for graphics cards at the moment I am hoping to sell my RX480 for a reasonable price to minimise the cost to change.

Obviously this card is gimped compared to the 6600XT, which in hindsight would have been a better purchase when under £400. However, the 6600 should be a decent step up in performance compared to my RX480 at 1080p and will be more power efficient on (dual monitor) desktop and when gaming. For reference my RX 480 was £220 in April 2017.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/asus-rx-480-strix-oc/

 

[r9]

The trend continues ... Manufacturers "If you can't beat the scalpers join them."
I really hope the PC gaming starts dying again like it did it did in the past.
I'm tired of this fake shortage nonsense lookup any company AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, ASUS I mean any they are all making record profits.
People who buy into this nonsense they can might as well believe in flat earth.

 

[Muaadib]

I'm gonna go hug my $350 mid-pandemic RX 5700.

 

[W1zzard]

RX 6600: 21.30.17.06 Press Driver???

yes, that's how their versioning works

If it would have come in at $279, I think it would have been a formidable card - nipping at the heels of the RTX 3060 and priced $50 less

now all we need is RTX 3060 for $279+$50 available anywhere i'd like to buy 1000 pieces please, so i can resell with 100% profit

 

[xorbe]

now all we need is RTX 3060 for $279+$50 available anywhere i'd like to buy 1000 pieces please, so i can resell with 100% profit

EVGA 3060 XC Black (lowest price $329 stock clock card) ... they only sent out 8 minutes worth of orders, and then never sent out another card since February. These cards basically don't exist, yet every website has one in their benchmark charts ...

 

[mechtech]

@W1zzard

does TPU have any plans in the future to expand the gpu test suite to include multimedia tests such as h264/265, vp9, playback, encoding, decoding, handbrake, etc?

 

[N3M3515]

The 5600xt had a MSRP of $280. So the 6600 is 16% more expensive and 12% faster, continuing the trend for everything that is not Big Navi of being a worse value perf/$ then the previous generation.

This.

 

[Turmania]

Do these miners use these kind of cards? I understand the reason to use 3080 and so on but these? Or is this manufacturers maximizing profits blaming miners at the same time?

 

[sepheronx]

oh boy:

XFX SPEEDSTER SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE 8GB w/ HDMI, Triple DP - PCI-E Video Cards - Memory Express Inc.

www.memoryexpress.com

 

[neatfeatguy]

EVGA 3060 XC Black (lowest price $329 stock clock card) ... they only sent out 8 minutes worth of orders, and then never sent out another card since February. These cards basically don't exist, yet every website has one in their benchmark charts ...

True, but EVGA sure did sell the hell out of the $399 model. Even if you were to get one of these you could still probably flip it for an extra $200+.

Too bad the prices are just stupid right now for all GPUs.

On a side note: I can pick up a RTX 3060 at my local Best Buy, you know, if I wanted to spend almost $660 after taxes....of course, it would take 5 days before it would actually be available to pick up at my local Best Buy.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

The more you buy the more you save.

Hang on !..

 

[Muaadib]

Do these miners use these kind of cards? I understand the reason to use 3080 and so on but these? Or is this manufacturers maximizing profits blaming miners at the same time?

A bit of both.

Miners are in a race to get their ROI before ETH eventually goes PoS, and even with the low hash rate they can get back what they paid for the card in a few months if they sell it to hungry gamers.

Manufacturers see that all cards are scalped anyway so why should they leave all the profit for retailers/AIB partners? hence the gradual increase in MSRP.

 

[mechtech]

I quickly checked what this card "sells" for in my country. Not even available yet, but considering the 6600 XT goes for $900+ equivalent, I was just like eh, fuckit, stuck with 580 for five more years.

Lol yep. I’m on an RX480 and it’s looking like it’s gonna be that way for awhile. Oh well I try to look at it positively like gpu upgrade in 9 years instead of 3 years. Save some money!!

I think my card was $330 cad. Got it before or at the start of the mining boom back when it was released. I would pay up to $400 cad for the 6600 at the most. Even though with inflation it should be about $360 cad.

I think supply is only going to get worse if Intel uses TSMC for their gpus also.

 

[Chrispy_]

Do these miners use these kind of cards? I understand the reason to use 3080 and so on but these? Or is this manufacturers maximizing profits blaming miners at the same time?

Yes. The vanilla 6600 might be the single most efficient ETH mining card on the market right now, with reports of 30MH/s at 50W

The 6600XT at 32MH/s at 55-60W was already pretty damn desirable.

I'm running a farm of 24x RX5700 with 56MH/s at 130W per card, and those are really good mining cards that sell for almost $1000. From a pure efficiency standpoint, a vanilla 6600 is 40% better. There are downsides in that you use more cards in total which requires more overhead in management and more motherboards/mining rigs but overall I think these are worth it for the efficiency tradeoff.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

The trend continues ... Manufacturers "If you can't beat the scalpers join them."
I really hope the PC gaming starts dying again like it did it did in the past.
I'm tired of this fake shortage nonsense lookup any company AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, ASUS I mean any they are all making record profits.
People who buy into this nonsense they can might as well believe in flat earth.

The basic definition of a shortage is demand in excess of supply. We can argue reasons all day (and do), but the fact remains that there are fewer cards available than customers looking to buy them. I don't know what to call that other than a shortage.

 

[Chrispy_]

The basic definition of a shortage is demand in excess of supply. We can argue reasons all day (and do), but the fact remains that there are fewer cards available than customers looking to buy them. I don't know what to call that other than a shortage.

Cryptocurrency mining was the first supply-and-demand wakeup call for the GPU industry in 2017 and they basically failed to meet demand then. From mid-2018 to the pandemic we had Turing and Navi. Turing was overpriced and under-supplied, despite there being a surplus of ex-mining cards serving the consumer market. AMD's 5700-series was kinda meh for gaming. It served to bring the 20-series down to a less-insulting price, but looking at the steam survey results, 5700-series cards didn't sell well at all. Either too little supply or too high a price...

Here we are 4 years after the initial GPU price hikes from the first mining boom and people will blame the pandemic but in reality the pandemic only caused about 9 months of disruption (at most) in the manufacturing centers of China/Taiwan. What we have now is the long delay between planning a capacity increase in fabs and end products rolling off those planned fabs. With a bit of luck, supply will meet demand at some point in 2022. It would be naive to presume that the cryptocurrency mining is going away; Mining is the reason more fabs are being made and it will eventually balance out with supply - we are just currently suffering from a mass-influx of miners that have drastically altered the supply/demand ratio. If there's ever a major regression in cryptocurrency, you can expect millions of GPUs to get dumped on the used market for next to nothing and existing stock to sell for a fraction of its usual price. I was buying RX570 8GB cards for workstation upgrades at £110 by the dozen back in 2019 because of this.

I was lucky enough to predict an worsening in GPU supply this yearand ordered a pallet of 5700 reference cards in January direct from a Taiwanese distributor. My only regret is not ordering 20 pallets. As overpriced as they were, I'd have paid less than half the current market value.

 

[RedelZaVedno]

Price of 6600 in Germany today: 500€ (580$). Lisa & miners go to hell! Nearly 5 years has past and AMDs low mid range still can't beat 1080TI & yet it costs half a kidney. It's all F***ed UP

 

[Chrispy_]

@W1zzard

does TPU have any plans in the future to expand the gpu test suite to include multimedia tests such as h264/265, vp9, playback, encoding, decoding, handbrake, etc?

I do a fair bit of encoding using software h.264/265 and outside of live-streaming I don't see any point to hardware encoding/handbrake performance; Quicksync or GPU encoding is fast but 95% of the time it's about efficiency - in other words about how good it looks for any given bitrate or file size.

Quicksync, NVENC, AMD's encoder (AMF) are all garbage quality compared to a two-pass software 264/265 encode which is why I still use the CPU(s) to do that job. Where the multimedia performance matters is live-streaming where NVENC > AMF and Quicksync doesn't get touched because GPU encoding is way better for live-streaming. For that, we're seeing an update to the encoder hardware once or twice a decade, so there's no point testing it every single GPU review. One article per encoder update would be nice and there are sites that have compared various encoders in one-off articles.

There will be minor differences per GPU but h264/265/vp9 playback is something a potato CPU can handle even without a hardware decoder and NVENC encoding is undisputably the best option for streamers. Since a 1650S will perform as well as a pair of 3090s it's essentially pointless to investigate further until something comes along that succeeds either NVENC, AMF, or Quicksync.

 

[W1zzard]

@W1zzard

does TPU have any plans in the future to expand the gpu test suite to include multimedia tests such as h264/265, vp9, playback, encoding, decoding, handbrake, etc?

I don't have any plans to include these in my regular reviews, but someone else mailed me about doing a feature article, comparing encoders, how many parallel streams, quality, etc. Won't be in 2021, just too much happening atm

 

[Chrispy_]

I don't have any plans to include these in my regular reviews, but someone else mailed me about doing a feature article, comparing encoders, how many parallel streams, quality, etc. Won't be in 2021, just too much happening atm

As much as I'd read your take on NVENC/AMF/Quicksync/Software encoders it's unlikely to be why TPU readers visit the site and many other sites have covered it.

IMO it's a backburner project for a slow news day, or something to look forward to if an updated encoder appears with Intel Arc, Geforce 4000-series or Radeon 7000-series.

 

[Turmania]

Yes. The vanilla 6600 might be the single most efficient ETH mining card on the market right now, with reports of 30MH/s at 50W

The 6600XT at 32MH/s at 55-60W was already pretty damn desirable.

I'm running a farm of 24x RX5700 with 56MH/s at 130W per card, and those are really good mining cards that sell for almost $1000. From a pure efficiency standpoint, a vanilla 6600 is 40% better. There are downsides in that you use more cards in total which requires more overhead in management and more motherboards/mining rigs but overall I think these are worth it for the efficiency tradeoff.

Thank you for the detailed information, I have no idea what MH stands for, I`m assuming mining per hour or something along those.

 

[dont whant to set it"']

So , where is the the Top Dog RTX 3090 Nvidia brought in ,in relation to the performance per Watt chart hmm? , Oh! , it is that it cannot be bothered going after Intel's "burn a whole trough the Earth'' approach, but at least Intel might have something with the e-cores running the os, security , "web-stuff'' and what not, all the while leaving the heavy lifting for the P-cores.
What happened to the price bracket from $230 to $270? Ah!, and without being a troll, I just minutes ago swapped an AMD card for an Nvidia one (reasons: personal), and before I got into reading this review.
Surprised I am that an RX5700XT is that far away(later edit: behind the RX6600).

"Segways all-around"
.

 

[aktpu]

Managed to order one with MSRP pricing, now I can finally dump my old GTX1080

 

[KarymidoN]

great review, but with those prices we're doomed.

 

[Vader]

From a technical standpoint i find interesting how navi 23 competes against the 3060 with a smaller die, narrower memory bus, and lower power consumption. They should be notably cheaper to manufacture than a 3060. I wonder how would they be priced in a normal market.