Packaging
The Card
ASUS did a great job miniaturizing their latest ROG design language to a much more compact design. The dominating colors are black and various shades of gray. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate.
Dimensions of the card are 25.5 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 866 g.
Installation requires three slots in your system.
Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1. Display and media capabilities are identical to the rest of the RDNA 2 family.
The card has one 8-pin power input. This configuration is rated for up to 225 W of power draw.
The AMD Radeon RX 6600 series doesn't support multi-GPU. ASUS has placed their dual BIOS switch here. The default setting is "P" for "Performance," and the secondary setting is "Q" for "Quiet Mode."
Teardown
The ASUS RX 6600 XT STRIX OC uses an interesting design we're not seeing very often. The fans and cooler shroud are one assembly, and the heatsink base with the heatpipes and fins are separate. This makes it very easy to replace fans, if they die for whatever reason.
The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but the VRM circuitry and memory chips, too. The thermal pads for the memory are 1.8 mm thick, and those for the VRM are 2.0 mm thick.
The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. The thermal pads on the back are 3.7 mm thick.