As part of our Radeon RX 6600 XT launch coverage we have reviewed the following cards: ASUS RX 6600 XT STRIX OC, MSI RX 6600 XT Gaming X, Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse OC, and XFX RX 6600 XT Merc 308

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 Ray Accelerators. 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 the RX 6600 XT beating NVIDIA's RTX 3060 easily, with 14% better performance. Compared to the RTX 3060 Ti, it is 12% slower, though. AMD's last-generation flagship, the RX 5700 XT, ends up 8% slower than 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: -5%, RTX 2080: +1%, RTX 2080S: +5%). AMD's own RX 6700 XT is 16% faster than the RX 6600 XT.

If we look at higher resolutions, especially 4K, we can see the RX 6600 XT fall 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 the L3 cache performs very well here. The same goes for VRAM size. While the RTX 3060 non-Ti does offer 12 GB VRAM, this really has no effect at lower resolutions—AMD's 8 GB VRAM choice is the perfect amount.

In this review, we tested the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X, the company's flagship RX 6600 XT card. 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 2% performance improvement at 1080p, and 3% at 1440p and 4K. Other RX 6600 XT cards we tested don't do much better here. GPU manufacturers have gotten better and better at eking out the last bits of performance for the stock card, so additional factory overclocking potential is rather slim these days.

This makes the Radeon RX 6600 XT 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 RT, 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 you really absolutely must enable raytracing at this time to fully enjoy games—they are still developed for RT off; RT on is added at a later stage.

We've almost got used to seeing excellent cooler designs from MSI, and the Gaming X is no exception. Noise levels are very good with only 30 dBA, and temperatures are better than all other RX 6600 XT cards we've tested with the exception of the ASUS STRIX, which is very loud to achieve small temperature gains. MSI found a good balance between noise and temperature, though I feel a little bit quieter would have easily been done with only a minimal increase in temperature, like on the Sapphire Pulse. The differences are really small though, probably impossible to notice subjectively. In our apples-to-apples cooler testing, which operates all cards at the same heat output and noise level to remove all variables except for the heatsink's cooling capability, we found that the MSI cooler is the best of all those we tested, but the differences are small. The difference between best and worst cooler is only 4°C; it all comes down to the vendor-configured fan settings. 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 MSI Gaming X, 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. The Radeon RX 6600 XT with its Navi 23 GPU is highly efficient, too, and can match Ampere nicely, which wasn't so easy for Navi 22 on the RX 6700 XT. Efficiency of MSI's Gaming X is a bit lower than competing RX 6600 XT cards because MSI increased the operating voltage a bit, which improves GPU frequency yields, but affects efficiency. With 183 W as opposed to 160 W, the difference is there, but it's not big enough to lose any sleep over. The cooler is totally adequate for the extra heat output, too, making it a non-issue. The power requirement is also modest enough that any half-decent power supply will be able to handle the card 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 loss of a few percent in performance in general, with bigger losses and stuttering in specific games that move a lot of data across the bus.

Overclocking potential on the MSI Gaming X was lower than on the other RX 6600 XT cards we tested. While there's definitely some sort of random variation between samples, I think the underlying reason is that the MSI power limit slider only goes up to +4%, whereas the other cards max out at +20%. Due to the way overclocking on the RX 6600 XT works, this has a big effect on overclocking potential. The RX 6600 XT is constrained mostly by its power limit, so raising that is a must or you won't see any gains from overclocking. Since you can only go to +4% on MSI and +20% on others, the others can reach higher performance. 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. An issue in the past, these 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 know that these prices are a pure fantasy and not realistic in any way. At this time, the RTX 3060 sells for $550, the 3060 Ti for $700, and RX 6700 XT for $770. That's why I estimate the actual market price of the RX 6600 XT to be around $650. AMD has clarified that supply for the RX 6600 XT will be "challenging," which means there's definitely not enough stock to get everyone a card, and I'm sure scalper bots are already refreshing sites across the web. In our Performance per Dollar section, 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, and $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 compared to other options, like the RTX 2080 and RX 5700 XT, which can be found for less. There's also some competition from the RX 6700 XT, which can currently be had for $770 and performs higher.

MSI was unable to provide any price guidance a this time, which is not unexpected for this crazy market, but complicates my job as a reviewer. Given current market conditions, I expect the card to end up selling for around $680, $30 higher than the most basic cards. A bigger increase would be very difficult to justify because scalpers will happily sell you the RTX 3060 Ti for $700 and the RX 6700 XT for $770, which both offer higher performance. 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 for games for $200?