Introduction

While it was announced two weeks ago, only today are we allowed to share our review of the ASUS ROG RX 6600 XT STRIX OC. We have reviews for additional RX 6600 XT cards ready, but due to the AMD NDA regulations, "reviews not managed by AMD aren't allowed to be posted until tomorrow." Aimed solely at the vast majority of those who still game at Full HD (1080p), the RX 6600 XT is designed for AAA gaming at 1080p at conventional refresh rates, or certain e-sports titles at higher refresh rates. The RX 6600 XT meets all DirectX 12 Ultimate logo requirements, meaning it's capable of raytracing. With AMD's recent introduction of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), AMD claims that raytracing with fairly high eye-candy should be possible with this card, made more playable with FSR.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT debuts AMD's smallest GPU of this generation to the desktop consumer graphics segment, the 7 nm Navi 23. Based on the company's latest RDNA 2 graphics architecture, this silicon packs up to 2,048 of the latest-generation graphics cores, up to 32 Ray Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. AMD has taken an interesting approach to memory, which should pay big dividends if it ever engages in a price war with NVIDIA in the lower end of this segment: 8 GB is the standard memory size, but over a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface. At a speed of 16 Gbps, this works out to a raw memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s. Giving this a boost is 32 MB of fast Infinity Cache memory located on the GPU die.



Across the fence, the Radeon RX 6600 XT finds competition in the Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3060, which is popular not just because it's the most affordable RTX 30-series card in the retail market, but also since it's the least overpriced option from scalping. Still, the Radeon RX 6600 XT debuts at a not-so-affordable starting MSRP of $379, and there are no reference-design cards, which is why our first review is of this ASUS ROG STRIX card. To put this price into perspective, the RX 6600 XT is about 36% pricier than its predecessor, the RX 5600 XT, which launched at $279, and 283% pricier than the RX 560. Scalpers will certainly drive up prices further because AMD has confirmed that supply of the RX 6600 XT will be challenging after launch. Our estimate based on the current market situation is that RX 6600 XT will end up selling for around $650.

The ASUS ROG STRIX OC RX 6600 XT debuts a brand-new dual-fan cooling solution that retains the design language of the ROG STRIX cards from this generation, but in a more compact form factor. It uses a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink with four direct-touch heat pipes, two Axial Tech fans, an RGB LED lighting element, and other premium features, like Dual BIOS. It also comes with ASUS's highest factory OC for the RX 6600 XT in the performance-oriented "P-mode" BIOS. The "Q-mode" BIOS is designed for low-noise gaming. ASUS is pricing the ROG STRIX RX 6600 XT O8G at a starting price of $550, so $170 higher than the AMD MSRP.