Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle Review 23

Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle Review

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Introduction

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We have with us the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle, a premium custom-design graphics card based on AMD's latest mid-range GPU. The RX 6600 (non-XT) is designed for 1080p gaming with maximum settings, and meets the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set. Gigabyte's value-addition comes in the form of a large, premium-looking dual-slot cooling solution. The RX 6600 shares the 7 nm Navi 23 silicon with the RX 6600 XT launched this August, but is slightly cut down to bring down prices. The card could appeal to the e-sports gaming crowd that's playing at 1080p.



AMD carved the Radeon RX 6600 out of the Navi 23 silicon by disabling 4 out of 32 compute units physically present, resulting in 1,792 stream processors, 28 Ray Accelerators, 112 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory size is unchanged at 8 GB, as is the memory type—GDDR6 across a 128-bit wide memory bus. The memory data-rate is lower, at 14 Gbps, compared to 16 Gbps on the RX 6600 XT, resulting in memory bandwidth of 224 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s. AMD's innovation in the memory space with this generation is Infinity Cache, a fast on-die L3 cache memory that cushions data transfers between GPU and memory. For the RX 6600, the same 32 MB Infinity Cache is used as on the RX 6600 XT.

The RX 6600 is based on the same RDNA 2 graphics architecture as the rest of AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series, which has propelled the company back to competitiveness across all consumer graphics market segments, including the enthusiast segment. This is AMD's first architecture that features real-time ray tracing hardware acceleration. Fixed function hardware called Ray Accelerators perform the most compute-intensive part of the ray tracing pipeline (ray intersection calculations), while much of the other ray tracing pipeline is handled by compute shaders. A consequence of this is that AMD has had to significantly increase throughput of its SIMD machinery through not just IPC increases of the RDNA 2 compute unit, but also significant increases in engine clocks. This is what makes the RX 6600 an interesting mid-range card for the 1080p crowd.

The Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle features a large WindForce 3X cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's fed heat by three copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base. This heatsink is ventilated by three 100 mm fans. The card is longer than the PCB itself, which means much of the airflow from the third fan goes right through the heatsink and out the backplate from a large cutout. Just like all other RX 6600 cards on the market, the Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle in this review ticks at AMD reference speeds—no overclocked variants are available at this time. AMD originally designed the RX 6600 to undercut NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 at a lower price. In this review, we find out if the GPU is able to meet that goal with much better cooling.

AMD Radeon RX 6600 Market Segment Analysis
 PriceCoresROPsCore
Clock
Boost
Clock
Memory
Clock
GPUTransistorsMemory
GTX 1650 Super$4001280321530 MHz1725 MHz1500 MHzTU1166600M4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
GTX 1660$480 1408481530 MHz1785 MHz2000 MHzTU1166600M6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
RX Vega 56$8003584641156 MHz1471 MHz800 MHzVega 1012500M8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1660 Super$5001408481530 MHz1785 MHz1750 MHzTU1166600M6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1660 Ti$5001536481500 MHz1770 MHz1500 MHzTU1166600M6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5600 XT$6002304641375 MHz1560 MHz1500 MHzNavi 1010300M6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2060$5501920481365 MHz1680 MHz1750 MHzTU10610800M6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700$9502304641465 MHz1625 MHz1750 MHzNavi 1010300M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super$7502176641470 MHz1650 MHz1750 MHzTU10610800M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64$950 4096641247 MHz1546 MHz953 MHzVega 1012500M8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
RX 5700 XT$10002560641605 MHz1755 MHz1750 MHzNavi 1010300M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070$7502304641410 MHz1620 MHz1750 MHzTU10610800M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6600$620
MSRP: $330
1792642044 MHz2491 MHz1750 MHzNavi 2311060M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Gigabyte RX 6600
Eagle
$620
MSRP: $330
1792642044 MHz2491 MHz1750 MHzNavi 2311060M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 3060$7003584481320 MHz1777 MHz1875 MHzGA10613250M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super$8002560641605 MHz1770 MHz1750 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII$8003840641400 MHz1800 MHz1000 MHzVega 2013230M16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RX 6600 XT$6502048642359 MHz2589 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2311060M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 2080$8002944641515 MHz1710 MHz1750 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super$9003072641650 MHz1815 MHz1940 MHzTU10413600M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti$8004864801410 MHz1665 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT$850
2560642424 MHz2581 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2217200M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti$11004352881350 MHz1545 MHz1750 MHzTU10218600M11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070$9505888961500 MHz1725 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
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