Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle Review

Name: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle
Brand: GIGABYTE
Price: 620 USD

W1zzard

on Nov 16th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: GIGABYTE

(23 Comments) »

Introduction

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
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
GTX 1650 Super	$400	1280	32	1530 MHz	1725 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	4 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
GTX 1660	$480	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
RX Vega 56	$800	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1660 Super	$500	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	1750 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1660 Ti	$500	1536	48	1500 MHz	1770 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5600 XT	$600	2304	64	1375 MHz	1560 MHz	1500 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2060	$550	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$950	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$750	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$950	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
RX 5700 XT	$1000	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$750	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6600	$620 MSRP: $330	1792	64	2044 MHz	2491 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 23	11060M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle	$620 MSRP: $330	1792	64	2044 MHz	2491 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 23	11060M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 3060	$700	3584	48	1320 MHz	1777 MHz	1875 MHz	GA106	13250M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$800	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$800	3840	64	1400 MHz	1800 MHz	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RX 6600 XT	$650	2048	64	2359 MHz	2589 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 23	11060M	8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 2080	$800	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$900	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$800	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$850	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1100	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$950	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit

Packaging

The Card

Gigabyte's card is the longest RX 6600 out there. It's also the only triple-fan design available—competing cards are dual-fan only. On the back, you'll find a plastic backplate.

Dimensions of the card are 28.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 659 g.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 1.4 and two 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.

Teardown

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses three heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. The thermal pads on the memory are 0.8 mm thick, and those on the VRM are 1.5 mm thick.

The backplate is made from plastic, which is definitely better than no backplate. Using plastic allows for more creativity in terms of shape; here, we see how the backplate partially wraps around the card, which creates a more industrial design look and feel.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.