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 RT cores. 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 that the RX 6600 XT beats 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 the 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 that the RX 6600 XT falls 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 here the L3 cache performs very well. The same goes for VRAM size. While the RTX 3060 non-Ti does offer 12 GB VRAM, it really has no effect at lower resolutions—AMD's 8 GB VRAM choice is the perfect amount.

In this review, we tested the Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse OC, which is Sapphire's entry-level version of the RX 6600 XT; they also offer the Nitro+, which comes with a more powerful cooler and additional features. Sapphire's rated factory overclock for the Pulse is quite small, only a 4 MHz increase from 2589 MHz to 2593 MHz, or 0.15%. I'm not sure if it's right to even call this an overclock, but lucky for Sapphire, our results suggest that the difference is bigger, around 1–2% depending on the resolution. While this isn't a huge increase, it's better than nothing, and other RX 6600 XT custom-design we've tested aren't doing much better here.

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 if you really absolutely must enable raytracing at this time to fully enjoy games—games are still developed for RT off; RT on is added at a later stage.

Yesterday, we reviewed the ASUS STRIX 6600 XT, which is the company's flagship design and has a +$170 price premium over the AMD MSRP. Sapphire's Pulse is only $20 more expensive than MSRP, but achieves MUCH better noise levels that are almost whisper-quiet. Reduced noise levels usually mean increased temperatures, and the Sapphire Pulse does indeed run at 70°C while the ASUS STRIX ran at 59°C. But does that make an actual difference? I don't think so. There's still plenty of headroom for a small case with bad ventilation in hot weather. This is the balance between temperature and noise levels I'm talking about in my reviews, so great job, Sapphire! We also tested cards from XFX and MSI today, which both slightly shift that balance towards lower noise (XFX) and better temperature (MSI). The differences are quite small and even harder to spot subjectively without measuring equipment, though.

Now that we're allowed to show all results for all RX 6600 XT cards, our apples-to-apples cooler comparison data has become interesting, too. The results clearly show that the coolers on the four cards we tested are very similar. The difference between best and worst cooler is only 4°C when operating at the same heat output and noise level; negligible, 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 Sapphire Pulse in this review, 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. Efficiency of the Sapphire Pulse is better than anything NVIDIA has ever released and better than AMD's RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT; only the RX 6800 non-XT is a bit more efficient. With just 160 W, the RX 6600 XT is very modest in its power requirements—any half-decent power supply will be able to handle it just fine. I'd also like to point out that Sapphire's card is the most efficient RX 6600 XT card we tested this week; it seems other vendors dialed up the voltage slightly to achieve higher factory overclocks, which cost a bit of efficiency.

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 performance loss of a few percent in general, with bigger losses and stuttering in specific games that move a lot of data across the bus.

Overclocking worked well on the Sapphire Pulse. We gained 8% in real-life performance, which is a decent result. It seems 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. 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. A huge issue in the past, they 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 be aware that these prices are a pure fantasy and not realistic in the slightest. Currently, the RTX 3060 sells for $550, the 3060 Ti for $700, and the 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, $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 against other options, like the RTX 2080 and RX 5700 XT, which can be found for less than that. There's also some competition from the RX 6700 XT, which can currently be found for $770 and has higher performance.

According to Sapphire, the RX 6600 XT Pulse will sell for an MSRP of $400, which is a reasonable $20 increase over the AMD base price. Of course, we won't see such pricing in the market, but I think Sapphire understood that it's important to build a cost-optimized card that comes without all the expensive bells and whistles, yet performs well. Our testing confirms that performance is identical to other, more expensive RX 6600 XT variants. Cooling performance is good, too—almost inaudible, and it has good temperatures. What more do you need from a graphics card? Given current market conditions, I estimate that Sapphire's card will end up at around $670, which is still a lot of money. 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 to play games for $200?

I'm giving the Sapphire Pulse our "Recommended" award because it's a great RX 6600 XT card that you should consider above others if you are in the market for an RX 6600 XT and can live with the currently inflated prices.