AMD's Radeon RX 6600 (non-XT) is the smaller brother to the RX 6600 XT launched in August. These cards are targeted at the plethora of 1080p Full HD gamers out there—the "RX 580 and RX 570" equivalent of 2021. Under the hood, the Radeon RX 6600 is powered by the same Navi 23 silicon as the RX 6600 XT. For the non-XT, AMD reduced the core count from 2048 cores to 1792. VRAM is unchanged, it remains at 8 GB GDDR6 128-bit; the only surprise here is that memory chips from Hynix are used—this the first time we're seeing GDDR6 from Hynix. AMD also hasn't made any changes to the Level 3 cache on the GPU, which helps achieve the targeted performance. 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.

On average, across our brand-new 25-game strong test suite, we found the RX 6600 to match the RX 5700 and RTX 2070 exactly at Full HD. Compared to the NVIDIA RTX 3060, RX 6600's direct rival, the NVIDIA card has a tiny 4% lead. The Radeon RX 5700 XT is 10% faster, and the RX 6600 XT is 13% ahead and sits right in the middle of the gap between the RX 6600 and RX 6700 XT. NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti is 30% faster than the RX 6600. The aging Vega 64 is 13% behind the RX 6600, just like last-generation's RTX 2060. What's important to point out is that the RX 6600 really is built for 1080p. If you look at our performance results for 1440p and 4K, you'll see that the card falls behind relative to competing cards at those resolutions. The underlying reason is that the L3 cache is relatively small, just big enough for the gaming workloads of 1080p, and cache hit rates go down at higher resolutions.

These performance numbers make the RX 6600 a good choice for playing at the highly popular 1080p Full HD resolution. Nearly all titles in our test suite ran at over 60 FPS at the highest settings. Only Cyberpunk 2077 (52 FPS) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (58 FPS) did not, but were close enough. All these benchmarks were with ray tracing disabled. We also expanded our ray tracing test suite with the new bench, and the RX 6600 really can't deliver here. Framerates are pretty much unplayable across the board as the performance hit from enabling ray tracing is between 30–60%. Competing cards from NVIDIA do much better here, often achieving twice (!) the FPS of the RX 6600. I still think this isn't a big deal. With a card like the RX 6600, enabling ray tracing simply isn't worth it considering the graphics improvement ray tracing brings. In some titles, the RT effects come with a small performance penalty, but only a negligible visual difference that is almost impossible to spot, so much so that you'll wonder "that's what I sacrificed X FPS for?". AMD recently introduced their FSR upscaling technology, which works on all cards, including the NVIDIA and RX 6600, of course. While this could be a mechanism to cushion the performance hit from ray tracing, I'm not convinced if it's a trade-off I'm willing to recommend for every single game. Still, FSR can be useful for a few extra FPS with minimal loss in image quality.

In this review, we tested the PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter, which is a bare minimum implementation of the RX 6600. Looking at the other designs that were announced, it seems there's serious pricing pressure on the AIBs to come up with the most basic cards to maximize margins, or even perhaps be able to hit targeted price points. Either way, most board partners have decided not to send out samples for the RX 6600, which is why we only have one review for you today, instead of the usual four or five. Why should they even bother with reviews? They'll sell everything anyway, and reviews have a chance of uncovering issues with the product, especially on these cost-down designs with simple coolers.

That's exactly what I expected when I first saw the PowerColor Fighter AMD sent me. After some testing, I have to admit that my initial assumption was wrong, though. The cooler works very well and achieves good temperatures (70°C) and impressive noise levels (29.7 dBA) despite being a compact dual-slot design variant. It's good to see that idle-fan-stop has become a mandatory capability nowadays even in this segment—the RX 6600 will shut off its fans in idle, desktop work, and internet browsing.

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 cards didn't do so well in our noise testing. These cards came with relatively big coolers, yet ran still louder than the RX 6600. The secret sauce is, once again, AMD's extremely high energy efficiency. With just 120 W during gaming, the RX 6600 draws very little power, yet offers sufficient punch for 1080p at highest details. This is the most energy-efficient graphics card I ever tested, considerably more efficient than even NVIDIA's Ampere architecture—who would have thought that just a few years ago. The low power draw of the GPU reduces heat output accordingly, which means the cooler can be smaller and run at slower fan speed to achieve a given target temperature. I was still curious and pitted the cooler of the PowerColor Fighter against that of the more premium RX 6600 XT models we tested in August, which clearly showed that today's card has much less cooling capability. This isn't any issue at all since heat and noise are still good.

While I praised AMD for the increased overclocking limits on the RX 6600 XT, they are back to their old ways with the RX 6600. The slider length in Radeon Settings does not nearly reach far enough to maximize the card's potential, maybe to protect the Radeon RX 6600 XT. We still achieved a 6.5% real-life performance improvement, which is very decent and will help you get 60 FPS in all titles.

AMD has announced a $329 price point for the RX 6600, which, if you've looked at our Performance per Dollar charts, is clearly unrealistic given current market conditions. Considering the performance offered, I think the RX 6600 will quickly gravitate towards around $600. Its strongest competitor is the NVIDIA RTX 3060, which currently goes for $700, and worth mentioning are also the RTX 2060 at $550 and RX 6600 XT at $630, which limits how far the RX 6600 non-XT can go up in price. If you are searching for a 1080p card, you might also want to look at older, used cards, as these offer similar performance at similar or better pricing, albeit with worse energy efficiency. While it's certainly nice to have the capability, ray tracing isn't an essential feature to have in this segment, so don't be afraid to think outside the box.

I sincerely wish AMD would have sufficient volume of the RX 6600—they could sell millions. It's a perfect choice to get into 1080p gaming, and thanks to its excellent energy efficiency, it can do so without much heat and noise, and even the worst OEM power supply will be able to power an RX 6600 gaming rig.