Introduction

The new MSI Radeon RX 6650 XT Gaming X graphics card is designed to lead the company's RX 6650 XT series. AMD refreshed its RX 6000 series RDNA 2 graphics cards with three new models today, with the other two the RX 6750 XT and RX 6950 XT. These are designed as updates to the product stack, with a handful enhancements over the models they displace. Graphics card prices are cooling down, and gamers are finally in the market with Summer upon us. This gives AMD the opportunity to put something new and improved on shelves, so here's we are with the RX 6650 XT.



The RX 6650 XT is based on the same RDNA 2 graphics architecture as the RX 6600 XT that received praise for being fairly competitive in the mid-range. It's also built around the same 7 nm "Navi 23" silicon. There are three areas where AMD improved the card. The first of these is GPU clock speeds. AMD turned up the GPU clocks (game clocks) to 2410 MHz, up from 2359 MHz on the RX 6600 XT.

The second area of improvement is memory, with AMD dialing up memory speeds to 18 Gbps, up from 16 Gbps on the RX 6600 XT. The card comes with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface, making the memory speed increase particularly handy as the memory bandwidth goes from 256 GB/s to 288 GB/s, which is still lower than the 334 GB/s bandwidth on the RTX 3060 with its 192-bit memory bus. AMD is overcoming memory bandwidth shortfalls with the innovative Infinity Cache on-die memory. The RX 6650 XT gets 32 MB of it, and the "effective bandwidth" is now 469 GB/s. The third area of improvement is in the firmware and driver levels; we observed some improvement in CPU-limited games, which of course is a non-issue for the RX 6650, but it's a noteworthy effect on the more powerful cards.

The core-configuration of the RX 6650 XT is identical to the RX 6600 XT—you get 2,048 stream processors spread across 32 RDNA 2 compute units, with 32 Ray Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. AMD continues to use the PCI-Express 4.0 x8 bus interface with the RX 6650 XT to reduce board costs. By itself, Gen 4 x8 is plenty of bandwidth (comparable to Gen 3 x16), but when used on an older machine with PCIe Gen 3 slots, the card operates at Gen 3 x8, not Gen 3 x16, which is how the RTX 3060 does it.

The MSI Radeon RX 6650 XT Gaming X features the company's latest-generation Twin Frozr cooling solution with a meaty aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a pair of noise-optimized fans and some RGB lighting. MSI has given the RX 6650 XT an impressive overclock of 2523 MHz (vs. 2410 MHz reference). AMD set $400 as the starting price for the RX 6650 XT as it replaces the RX 6600 XT, which will be retired from the product stack. MSI was unable to provide any pricing guidance at all. Based on pricing we received from other vendors, we estimate the MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X Trio to sell for around $500.