Introduction

AMD today debuted the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card, a quick addition to the company's latest generation of GPUs that restores competition across all price points in the GPU space. The RX 6600 is a follow-up to the RX 6600 XT launch from August. It's being positioned as a pure-1080p performance-segment card that lets you play any of today's AAA or e-sports titles with fairly high settings, at 1080p with 60 Hz. Given 1080p continues to be the most popular gaming resolution some 12 years in the running, this card has its task cut out.



The Radeon RX 6600 is based on the same 7 nm Navi 23 silicon as the RX 6600 XT. While its bigger sibling maxes out the silicon, enabling all 32 RDNA 2 compute units and 2,048 stream processors, the new RX 6600 comes with 28 out of 32 CUs enabled, which works out to 1,792 stream processors. It has the same amount of memory at 8 GB, across the same 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, and also has the same 32 MB on-die Infinity Cache memory. The only difference is memory speeds. The RX 6600 gets 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory instead of the 16 Gbps memory of the RX 6600 XT (224 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s bandwidth).

As you'll notice above, the Radeon RX 6600 lacks a reference design, and the launch is being handled entirely by AMD's board partners. We have with us the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 Fighter, the company's most affordable custom RX 6600 implementation. It comes with a rather basic-looking design, a cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a pair of fans, and, importantly, compact dimensions of under 20 cm in length, 2-slot thickness, and full-height (no taller). The card draws power from a single 8-pin power connector and sticks to AMD reference clock speeds. AMD is pricing the RX 6600 at a starting price (read: fantasy price) of $330, which is $50 cheaper than the RX 6600 XT. In the real world, we expect this card to be priced north of $600.

Packaging

The Card

PowerColor's Radeon RX 6600 Fighter is dominated by the cooler's black plastic surface. Through the two fans, you can see the shiny metal of the heatsink. A backplate is not available.


Dimensions of the card are 20.0 x 11.0 cm, and it weighs 474 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one 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

PowerColor's thermal solution uses three heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. The thermal pads on the memory are 0.8 and 3.0 mm thick, and those on the VRM are 1.0 mm thick.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a small VRM heatsink becomes visible. It does get fairly warm, but thanks to the low power draw of the RX 6600, this isn't a problem at all.

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.



High-res versions are also available (front, back).

Circuit Board (PCB) Analysis

GPU voltage uses a 6-phase design and is powered by an IR35217 controller.


The GPU VRM uses OnSemi NCP302155 DrMOS components rated for 55 A.


Memory voltage uses a two-phase design and is generated by an NCP81022N controller.


For memory, 45 A OnSemi DrMOS components are used.


The GDDR6 memory chips are made by Hynix! First time we encounter Hynix GDDR6 memory in a TPU graphics card review. The model number is H56CBM24MIR-S2C. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (14 Gbps GDDR6 effective).


Built on the same TSMC N7 (7 nm) node as Navi 10, the Navi 23 silicon is spread across a 237 mm² die area and packs 11.6 billion transistors. The pinkish-red tinge we saw on Navi 10 is gone.