Should you get AMD’s RX 6600M or RX 6700M in your next gaming laptop? Obviously we
expect the higher tier 6700M to perform better, the question is,
by how much and is it worth paying more money for? Let’s find out!
Here are the differences in specs between these two laptop GPUs.
Basically the 6700M is better in pretty much every aspect. It’s got more stream processors,
more compute units, higher clock speed, higher power limit, 2 gigs of extra VRAM,
which is also faster with more memory bandwidth - so yeah better in every way.
To do this testing I’m using the Lenovo Legion 5 for the RX 6600M, and the MSI Delta 15 for
the RX 6700M. Both laptops were tested with an external 1440p screen so we can test two
resolutions and bypass integrated graphics, and both laptops were tested with the exact same
physical kit of memory, 16 gigs of DDR4-3200 CL22 x8 single rank memory in dual channel.
The 6600M in the Legion 5 seems to run at the 100 watt power limit specified by AMD,
though mine did briefly spike up to 109 watts in a GPU only workload. The 6700M
in the Delta 15 on the other hand is not the full wattage variant,
so it doesn’t get up to the max 135 watts specified by AMD.
I found that mine would run the GPU up to 115 to 120 watts in a GPU only workload,
but with the CPU also active at the same time it dipped to about 95 watts. I guess this is just
because the Delta 15 is meant to be a thinner design, and more power would equal more heat.
In any case, as far as I’m aware, right now this is the only laptop
with a 6700M anyway so there’s no other way to do this comparison.
Exact power levels of both is going to depend on the specific workload anyway, as AMD’s SmartShift
is going to move power between the CPU and GPU as needed. I think it would have been preferable
to compare both GPUs at their max power limit, but at the same time I suppose this is perhaps
a little more fairer, as this way both GPUs are kind of close together in terms of power limit.
This seems to be confirmed when looking at the total system power draw from the wall
when running Control at 4K max settings, an extremely GPU heavy test. The 6700M
laptop is only drawing 3% more power in the same workload, but despite the power difference, as
you’ll see soon this game still had above average improvements on the 6700M in terms of average FPS.
We’ll start out by comparing 17 games at 1080p and 1440p resolutions,
followed by things like pricing and availability.
Let’s start out with Cyberpunk 2077. I’ve got the 1080p results down the bottom and
the 1440p results at the top, with the RX 6600M results below the RX 6700M results.
There were only very minor differences in this game at 1080p. The 1% lows were
essentially the same, while the 6700M was only 4% faster in terms of average FPS,
though this is one of the smallest differences out of all 17 games tested. At the higher 1440p
resolution the 6700M has a larger 13% lead, though as we can see that’s only a 5 FPS difference.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and this game also had a
below average difference at the lower 1080p resolution, less than a 2 FPS difference,
not something you’re likely to notice in practice. The 6700M was further ahead with a higher 11%
lead at the 1440p resolution though, so the difference seems to get bigger when
we’re more GPU bound. More pixels to render better utilizes the GPU power available.
Don’t worry there are actually bigger gains in other games. In Control we’re looking at a 17%
higher average frame rate at the lower 1080p resolution on the 6700M, granted the 6600M is
still above 60 FPS at max settings here, so it’s not like it’s unplayable or anything.
The gap increases even further at 1440p, with the 6700M now reaching 31% higher average FPS,
and even its 1% low is now ahead of the average frame rate that the 6600M could provide.
Like we saw earlier, both laptops were drawing about the same amount of power from the wall
in this game, so the 6700M seems to be more power efficient given it’s reaching higher frame rates.
This game also has ray tracing support, and while Radeon graphics generally don’t do as
well here compared to Nvidia, the 6700M had a fairly big lead over the 6600M now,
with a 67% higher average frame rate at 1080p, and 94% higher at 1440p,
granted neither of these are exactly what I’d call playable frame rates.
Watch Dogs Legion was tested with the game’s benchmark, and this one gives
some warnings about 8 gigs of VRAM only just being enough for the test at max settings,
so the 6600M is borderline enough, granted we could of course just lower settings a bit
in the real world. I want GPU heavy settings though, as this is a GPU comparison after all.
At 1080p the 6700M was reaching 18% higher average frame rate, and 24% higher at 1440p,
the third biggest difference out of all 17 games tested.
Call of Duty Warzone had much smaller differences, just a 10 FPS change at 1080p, or 8% faster on the
6700M, which honestly I don’t think is enough of a change for most people to notice in practice
considering the 6600M’s 1% low is still around 100. The 6700M had a higher 12% lead at the higher
1440p resolution, but yeah still not a whole lot of improvement in this game compared to others.
Fortnite is another eSports title, and was tested by running the same replay
on both laptops. At 1080p the 6700M was reaching an 18% higher average frame rate,
the second largest difference out of all 17 games tested at this resolution. The difference at 1440p
is even larger, with the 6700M reaching 36% higher average FPS, the biggest difference at
this resolution with even the 1% low higher than the 6600M’s average frame rate result.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was tested in the Sydney landing challenge.
The 6600M was still reaching 60 FPS at high settings when running at 1080p.
The 6700M was 8% ahead, or like 5 FPS, so nothing major. The difference isn’t
much larger at 1440p in this one, there’s less than a 5 FPS gap here.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gave some strange results. At 1440p the 6700M was a little ahead,
as expected, but at the lower 1080p resolution the 6600M was actually in front. I’m not exactly sure
why this was the case, and although I don’t have the 6700M anymore to retest, the 6800M got 87 FPS
here. I double checked the specs of both GPUs and the 6700M is technically better in all regards,
so the only thing I can think of is if this is related to a power limit difference,
as discussed earlier the 6700M in MSI’s Delta 15 isn’t a full wattage part so perhaps it’s
not as efficient with less power or something, but that’s just pure speculation on my part.
This wasn’t the only game where this behaviour was present, I saw the same deal in Battlefield V,
and although small, the 6600M was clearly ahead at the lower 1080p resolution.
Not quite the same thing in Borderlands 3, but at 1080p the 1% low at least was ahead on the 6600M,
while the average FPS from the 6700M was just 2 frames higher. At 1440p the 6700M had a 12%
lead, so perhaps it’s a CPU power limit difference between the laptops to some degree, as these sorts
of things would matter less when there are more pixels to render at higher resolutions.
Instead of talking through the rest of the 7 games individually in depth, I’ll
just blast through them so we can get into the average differences as that’s more interesting,
even if all of this testing did take many hours to complete. A
larger selection of games is important to help get a better rounded average.
Feel free to pause the video if you want a closer look at these additional games.
On average over all 17 games tested at 1080p, the higher tier RX 6700M was 9% faster than the
RX 6600M, so not a huge difference, though two of the games down the bottom were technically ahead
on the 6600M, but those seem like outliers and are probably due to the specific laptops I’m testing.
Most games did better on the 6700M as expected though. In the best case the
6700M was reaching 20% higher average frame rate in F1 2021 at the top of the graph.
Stepping up to the higher 1440p resolution and the 6700M now had a larger 16%
lead on average, with up to 36% in the best case with Fortnite at the top of the graph,
though as you can see it could vary a fair bit depending on the specific
game tested. Generally speaking, 1440p needs more GPU power to run,
so it’s not surprising to see a bigger difference between both GPUs compared to 1080p.
Great, so the 6700M performs better than the 6600M, surprising no one. The real question
is how much more does it cost and is it worth paying for? Prices of both will of
course change over time, so refer to those links in the description below for updates.
At the time of recording, Lenovo’s Legion 5 is on sale for $1300 USD,
but that’s the starting price with 6 core Ryzen 5 processor and 8 gigs of RAM. The configuration
I’ve tested is $115 more. The MSI Delta 15 on the other hand actually ends up being cheaper,
owing to a current sale, but without the sale it would be more expensive at $1600.
From a cost per frame perspective, the 6600M is a little better value if the 6700M is at full price,
but with the Delta 15 on sale it ends up being a better deal.
At the higher 1440p resolution the 6700M in the Delta 15 is better than the 6600M in the
Legion 5 in terms of value, even assuming you’re paying full price for the Delta.
Of course there are plenty of other differences between these laptops than just the GPU that’s
inside. For instance the Legion 5 has a MUX switch while the MSI Delta 15 does
not. I’m just comparing GPUs in this video and I’m aiming to do it in a fair manner,
so if you actually want to see all the details about the Delta 15 and
the Legion 5 then you can refer to the full review videos linked in the description.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to cover FSR in time for this video because,
as you might have noticed, the 6700M laptop is gone. I actually filmed the intro to this
video a couple of weeks ago because MSI needed it back, and unfortunately that
was just before Far Cry 6 launched, as I have been using that to test FSR lately.
As for the VRAM differences, in most cases I don’t think the differences between
8 gigs in the 6600M and 10 gigs in the 6700M is going to be that big of a difference. The simple
fact is I think 8 gigs is still plenty today even for higher 1440p resolution,
though this could of course change over time, and we only really saw it starting to become a
limit in one of the games, so yeah I don’t think I’d personally decide based purely on the VRAM,
but hey at least the 6600M still has more VRAM compared to the 6 gigs in Nvidia’s RTX 3060.
You can find out how the RTX 3060 compares against the RX 6600M in this comparison over
here next. Both laptops were tested in the exact same chassis there, so I’ve been able
to fairly compare things like thermals, battery life and more, so I’ll see you in that one.
Otherwise I’ve also compared the RX 6700M against Nvidia here if you want to see the differences.