Packaging

The Card

The Sapphire Pulse comes with a design theme that matches the company's other recent releases. Black is the main color, with red highlights. While the cooler shroud is made from plastic, I like the surface texture and that it has a little bit of a 3D structure without going overboard. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate with cutouts to let some airflow through.


Dimensions of the card are 24.0 x 12.0 cm, and it weighs 606 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. The card is only a tiny bit thicker than the PCIe slot cover, but that still makes it a triple-slot card. That said, if you have a very small card next to it, like a tiny sound card, it should fit just fine.


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

The Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse OC uses an interesting design we don't see very often. The fans and cooler shroud are one assembly, and the heatsink base with heatpipes and fins are separate from that. This makes it very easy to replace fans if they die for whatever reason.


The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but the VRM circuitry and memory chips, too. The thermal pads for the memory and VRM are 1.5 mm thick.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. It wraps around the card, which creates a more "solid" look and feel for the product.