With the Radeon RX 6600 XT, AMD has launched a graphics card targeted at the masses of 1080p Full HD gamers out there. The goal was to provide decent performance that can handle all games at the highest details at Full HD—AMD has achieved that goal. Every single game in our test suite ran at least 60 FPS, most considerably higher.

Under the hood, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is powered by the Navi 23 silicon. AMD's smallest graphics chip of the RDNA 2 generation so far comes with 2,048 graphics cores, 64 ROPs, 128 TMUs, and 32 RT cores. Just like the other Navi 2x chips, Navi 23 is built on TSMC's 7 nanometer production process. One of RDNA 2's core improvements is the inclusion of a large Level 3 cache, which achieves impressive performance gains. On Navi 23, this cache is relatively small with just 32 MB (Navi 22: 96 MB, Navi 21: 128 MB). This is certainly a compromise to reduce the chip's die size and manufacturing cost, more on that later.

On average, across our 22-game strong test suite, we find that the RX 6600 XT beats NVIDIA's RTX 3060 easily, with 13% better performance. Compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, it is 11% slower, though. AMD's last-generation flagship, the RX 5700 XT, ends up 9% slower than the 6600 XT. The generation-over-generation performance improvement compared to the RX 5600 XT is an impressive 35%. Last-generation cards from NVIDIA offer similar performance (RTX 2070S: -6%, RTX 2080: +0%, RTX 2080S: +4%). AMD's own RX 6700 XT is 15% faster than the RX 6600 XT.

If we look at higher resolutions, especially 4K, we can see that the RX 6600 XT falls behind quite a bit. The primary reason for that is that the L3 cache is rather small with just 32 MB, so it can't provide as much a benefit as with 1080p. The ~10% penalty from 1080p to 4K relative to other cards is hence surprisingly large, but no issue at all. The RX 6600 XT is designed for 1080p and 1440p gaming, and here the L3 cache performs very well. The same goes for VRAM size. While the RTX 3060 non-Ti does offer 12 GB VRAM, it really has no effect at lower resolutions—AMD's 8 GB VRAM choice is the perfect amount.

In this review, we tested the ASRock Radeon RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming, which is ASRock's most premium version of the RX 6600 XT. It comes overclocked to a rated boost of 2607 MHz out of the box, which is only a small increase over the AMD reference boost of 2589 MHz (+0.6%). In real life, this turns into a 3% performance improvement at 1080, making the ASRock Phantom Gaming the fastest RX 6600 XT we tested so far.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is an excellent choice for Full HD gaming at the highest settings, possibly with refresh rates exceeding 60 Hz. The card will also handle nearly all titles at 1440p with 60 FPS. Raytracing performance is challenging, though. While the card has hardware-acceleration for raytracing, the performance hit is just too big to make this a viable card for 1080p raytracing, as you'll drop well below 60 FPS in most titles. NVIDIA definitely has the upper hand here. The RTX 3060 and 3060 Ti are roughly twice as fast in raytracing due to additional hardware units. Even last generation's Turing RTX 2080, which offers similar non-RT FPS, runs faster here. Still, this is definitely not a dealbreaker. AMD has recently released their FSR upscaling technology, which will cushion the performance hit from raytracing, and I'm not even sure if you absolutely must enable raytracing at this time to fully enjoy games—games are still developed for RT off; RT on is added at a later stage.

The Phantom Gaming is the 5th RX 6600 XT card we're reviewing, and I have to say I'm impressed by its cooler. While the other cards had decent coolers, no doubt, the Phantom Gaming's thermal solution is just so much better. It achieves excellent temperatures of only 61°C, just 2°C higher than the ASUS STRIX, the coolest RX 6600 XT. Unlike the ASUS card, which is fairly loud, the card from ASRock is whisper-quiet at the same time—it's a night-and-day difference. ASRock has picked the perfect fan settings for their card: great temperatures and very little noise. Despite the excellent cooling performance, the card is relatively compact. It's barely thicker than dual-slot, which means you should be able to fit a small add-in card right next to it without problems.

Our apples-to-apples cooler comparison testing clearly shows that the magic is in the heatsink, not in voltage settings, VRM circuitry, or something else. At the same acoustic level and heat load, the ASRock cooler is up to 10°C better than other RX 6600 XT cards we've tested. While that sounds like a lot, do consider that temperatures are generally very good on the RX 6600 XT. Going from 60°C to 70°C, or even 75°C, really has no effect on anything other than the number in monitoring software. It doesn't affect RMA rates, longevity, or performance enough to be relevant. It's great to see that idle fan stop has become a standard capability nowadays—all Radeon RX 6600 XT cards that I know of, including the ASRock Phantom Gaming in this review, will shut off their fans in idle, desktop work, and internet browsing.

AMD shocked the world with the energy efficiency of Navi 21, which beats even NVIDIA's Ampere. Efficiency of the ASRock Phantom Gaming is better than most of NVIDIA's Ampere lineup, too, and also better than the RX 6700 XT. Big Navi is a bit more efficient, though. The underlying reason is that ASRock's card is a little bit on the power-hungry side. It uses 175 W during games, which means it consumes a little bit more power than some other RX 6600 XT cards, but not by a huge amount; Sapphire Pulse 160 W, XFX Merc 164 W, ASUS STRIX 166 W, ASRock Phantom Gaming 175 W, and MSI Gaming X 183 W. Generally speaking, the RX 6600 XT is very modest in its power requirements—any half-decent power supply will be able to handle it just fine.

What's surprising is that the Radeon RX 6600 XT does not support the full PCI-Express x16 interface, only x8. While I suspect this is a design choice that originated from laptops, where a wider bus isn't needed, desktops could definitely run into performance limitations when operating at x8. While it's certainly not a big deal for PCIe x8 4.0, running the Radeon RX 6600 XT in an older computer will have it operate at PCIe x8 3.0, which reduces the bandwidth significantly, resulting in a performance loss of a few percent in general, with bigger losses and stuttering in specific games that move a lot of data across the bus.

Overclocking worked very well on the ASRock card, better than on all other RX 6600 XT cards we've tested before. Our maximum manual overclock achieved a 10% real-life performance increase—quite nice. It seems the underlying reason is that ASRock operates their GPU at slightly higher voltage, which provides additional OC headroom. This theory is supported by the slightly higher power consumption numbers we saw—higher voltage means more power used. Just like on other RX 6600 XT cards, OC is constrained mostly by its power limit, so raising that is a must or you won't see any gains from overclocking. Memory overclocking is complicated a bit by the fact that these new memory chips have error correction, so finding the maximum OC involves more than just increasing the frequency and looking for rendering errors. What I'd like to praise AMD for is that they have significantly raised the overclocking limits in their Wattman OC driver interface. A huge issue in the past, they are now high enough for nearly all scenarios. Thanks, AMD!

AMD has announced an MSRP of $379 for the Radeon RX 6600 XT, which falls right between NVIDIA's MSRP for the RTX 3060 ($330) and RTX 3060 Ti ($400). If you've checked the graphics card market recently, you'll be aware that these prices are a pure fantasy and not realistic in the slightest. Currently, the RTX 3060 sells for $550, 3060 Ti for $700, and RX 6700 XT for $770. Right after launch, we saw some minimal volume of the RX 6600 XT available at or near MSRP, but these shipments are long sold out. Newegg doesn't show a single RX 6600 XT card in stock. On the other hand, there are hundreds with pricing around $650–$700 listed on eBay. This price point roughly matches the rest of the market, considering the price/performance ratio of the card. On the Performance per Dollar page, I've plotted a few theoretical price points for the RX 6600 XT to give you a feel of what's a reasonable price and what's overpriced. The way things are currently, the RX 6600 XT at $400 would be too good to be true, $600 would be a good price, slightly better than the RTX 3060 and RTX 3060 Ti. Going far above that, for example $800, would make the card uncompetitive against other options, like the RTX 2080 and RX 5700 XT, which can be found for less than that. There's also some competition from the RX 6700 XT, which can currently be found for $770 and has higher performance.

The AsRock RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming is listed online for an MSRP of $500, which is a cool $120 price increase over the AMD MSRP—more evidence that AMD's MSRP is completely unrealistic. Just like ASUS, it seems ASRock wants to keep scalper's profits for themselves, but can we blame them? In the current market, there's no way the RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming can sell for more than $700 because at that price point, you have competition from other cards with higher performance. Still, the ASRock RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming is a fantastic card. It clearly has the best cooler of all the RX 6600 XT cards, and the manufacturer paired that with excellent fan settings out of the box. I was also impressed by the OC potential, which of course depends on the silicon lottery. Compared to the ASUS STRIX, I think the Phantom Gaming is the better card. I also have to wonder where the budget cards are. Even $380 for a "x60" class card is a lot of money; wasn't there a time when you could buy a decent graphics card to play games for $200?

I'm giving the ASRock RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming our "Recommended" award because it's a great RX 6600 XT card you should consider above others if you are in the market for an RX 6600 XT and can live with the currently inflated prices.