- 1080P became the ultimate goal for gamers
back when the seventh generation of consoles launched,
and even the PCs of mere mortals
were able to reach that holy grail with AAA titles
by the time the Radeon HD 5970 and G-Force GTX 480
came out in 2010.
So why are we still getting excited
about 1080P graphics cards in 2021,
especially when they cost, what almost $400?
Am I in a time loop?
Oh man, not again!
Maybe if I review it, it'll stop,
or maybe if I tell you about our sponsor, iFixit.
Do you like to repair your own electronics
instead of having to spend hundreds
on expensive replacement or repair services?
Find out more about iFixit's Essential Electronics Toolkit
at the end of the video.
(upbeat techno music)
The RX 6600 XT is a strange release in many ways.
Yeah, it makes sense to release a GPU
that's less than half the die size of the RX 6800XT.
And, yeah, it makes sense
that it would use 16 gigabit GDDR6 chips.
Both of those things make it far easier
to manage supply constraints
that have been strangling production
and are projected to continue into 2022 or even 2023,
depending on who you ask.
No, what's strange is the pricing,
which we will get to, I promise,
but also the fact that because
there isn't an AMD branded card
this time around, AMD has made the decision
to send factory overclocked cards to reviewers,
which means that everything you see from this point on
needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Sure, the card has all the same basic features.
It's got eight gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, 32 compute units,
and as many megs of infinity cache,
and all the goodies that come with RDNA2,
like Ray Accelerators, real-time Ray tracing support,
but that's where the similarities
between the basic spec and what they've sent us end.
And what they've sent us
is AsRock's seriously overbuilt Phantom Gaming D card.
With a whopping three fans and as many heat pipes
to handle the 160 Watts worth of heat
this thing is supposed to be kicking out.
The overclock itself is pretty mild
at about 80 megahertz in game
and under 20 megahertz at peak boost,
which Andy says will be typical
of other factory overclocked cards,
so this atypical cooler is probably overkill.
The back plate for its part is thin
and seems to mostly be for show
with what looks to be a pair of thick boy thermal pads
on the back of the PCB.
I say looks like,
because in order to get the back plate off,
you need to take the cooler off,
and we've got benchmarks to do
before we mess with the card's thermal characteristics.
You know the drill: GPU bench, latest updates,
AMD's immediate family, and the two Nvidia GPUs
that the 6600 XT is most likely to take head-on.
You'll note we're using more RAM than before.
Dual write memory is good for you, you should try it.
Helps keep Ryzen fed anyway.
All our games will be running 1080P max settings
with Ray tracing turned to minimum where applicable.
Starting off with some surprising wins,
Forza Horizon 4 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla
put AMD's mid tier GPU ahead of NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti
by about 15 to 25%, which is absolutely fantastic
considering the cards are priced so close together.
Unfortunately, this pattern doesn't hold up
as we move on to other games like Final Fantasy 14
and F1 2021, where even with Ray tracing off,
the Radeon loses out by about 10%,
putting it closer to the cheaper RTX 3060.
This gets even worse when Ray tracing is enabled
and especially for a global illumination title
like Metro Exodus,
where we see the diminished Ray Accelerator count
really bring the pain.
Thankfully, global illumination is not really common yet,
but it's worth testing them all the same.
None of these results are especially bad, to be clear.
The lowest non Ray tracing result was still well over 60 FPS
and 1% minimums.
And it's consistently much faster than the RTX 3060,
but when you're forking over 3060 Ti money,
it all starts to look like an advertisement
for that card instead.
As always with cards this low on the ladder,
productivity isn't a major consideration,
but we're including benchmarks here,
because it's very possible
that you need something affordable for work at home.
And given that for $20 more,
the RTX 3060 Ti punches up
to trade blows with the RX 6700 XT,
it's no surprise that the cutdown 6600 XT
can't really compete here either even against the RTX 3060.
That's not to say that there aren't some AMD wins
in productivity though, even though the infinity cache
is much smaller with this card,
its ridiculously fast speed helps it
in memory intensive tasks
like in the energy and medical tests in SPECviewperf.
Although, chances are this class of card
will never see that kind of workload,
so it's a hollow victory.
Sort of like how our water bottles are hollow.
You gotta fill them with victory, you know?
Lttstore.com.
For thermals, considering neither the cooling
nor the clocks are stock,
and this card's probably not destined for a workstation,
we'll do something a little different today
and use two loops of five laps in F1 2021
to simulate gameplay
and see if that game clock can endure some heat.
As it turns out, AMD's total power estimate
was pretty accurate,
with an average of about 180 Watts and a peak of 225,
well below the RTX 3060 Ti.
But unfortunately also about as far above the RTX 3060.
The extremely overbuilt cooler
does the job fantastically though,
with temperatures hovering around 60 degrees at all times
in our closed chassis bench.
It kept boosting too,
with clocks throughout the test staying stable
at about that 2.6 gigahertz advertised maximum.
Not a bad showing at all, but then again,
this is a factory overclocked card.
Your mileage may vary.
And here's another weird thing about this launch.
See these, these pins here.
As the pre-launch rumor suggested, they're 100% for show.
You can even see where they stopped
being connected to anything.
Yeah, this GPU is wired for only eight lanes of PCI Express,
which seems like a waste of material.
Like, why have a full x16 cartridge connector
filled out with pins?
I guess it helps with physical stability?
I mean, this genuinely threw me for a loop
when I first noticed it, but eight lanes of Gen 4
makes sense when you think about it.
Not only are they equivalent to 16 Gen 3 lanes,
most GPUs at this performance level
won't even begin to utilize the full bandwidth
of a 16 lane slot.
This means that you're giving up nothing
to use one of these cards in one x16 slot
and then populate the other with a dual NVMe card
or something,
without compromising the performance of either.
Heck, if you're not squeamish, you can safely mod the card
for use as a server chassis or something
without losing any functionality.
The pins simply are not connected.
But now, we've gotta talk about the price.
At $380 for the base model, it's a steep ask.
When this card was announced,
we went into the reasons why this price, while painful,
makes sense in today's marketplace,
but it's going to continue being compared
to the launch price of the RTX 3060
and especially the 3060 Ti,
which is priced very competitively at $400.
The only problem with this take though
is those prices no longer exist and arguably never did.
Third parties were charging well in excess of that
before those cards launched.
There's no founders edition for the 3060,
and third parties are going to prefer higher margin cards
with the precious few GPUs they're able to get.
In my opinion,
that MSRP only really exists as a contractual obligation
to make it seem like it's cheaper than it really is
in order to undercut the competition.
And I suspect the same is true of the RX 6600 XT's MSRP too.
Just look at how much backlash they got for saying $379.
In fact, it seems that they're so concerned
with perception that they wouldn't even tell us
how much this particular AsRock card costs
and neither did AsRock.
If they pipe up before the video is done,
I'll put the price on screen now.
All of which is to say,
it's impossible to tell you what the real MSRP
of any of these cards is
other than what Nvidia and AMD say they are.
That makes it difficult
to put the RX 6600 XT into perspective.
On the one hand, it's slower than the RTX 3060 Ti,
that is its true price competitor,
but on the other, whether that price exists or not
depends on who you ask.
Our recommendation therefore is this:
if MSRP matters to you,
the RX 6600 XT is an underwhelming, but not disastrous, GPU.
You could do way worse.
If features matter to you,
the competition has DLSS at this price point,
and their video encoder
is better for you streamers out there.
And if scarcity pricing matters to you,
well, our recommendation as always is to get it if you can.
Be careful though, we've got a video coming
on how scam GPUs are becoming even weirder,
so be sure to get subscribed so you don't miss that.
And okay, I know that people don't like that
buy it anyway recommendation.
It sounds like I'm telling you
to just be a mindless consumer, I get it,
but the uncomfortable truth for both you and I
is that even if you don't want it,
it's a sound move for as long as demand outstrips supply.
Thankfully, I've got more than enough supply of segways
for sponsors like iFixit.
Thanks to iFixit for sponsoring today's video.
The iFixit Essential Electronics Toolkit
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Thanks for watching, guys.
Go ahead and check out our recent video
on just how viable old GPUs can be for modern games.
Maybe if you're still rocking an old flagship,
you don't need to worry
about these selling out right away, you know?