A lot of us aren't looking for top-of-the-line high-end GPU performance a lot of us can't
afford it either so with that today I bring you an unboxing overview and an install of the PowerColor
AMD Radeon 6500 XT ITX 4 gigabyte card ITX so small form factor it'll fit just about anywhere
and perfect for 1080p gaming so with that let's get to the unboxing so that we can get to the
install real quick so here she is again the PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT ITX, ITX is
the form factor it is a smaller form factor based off of AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture perfect for 1080p
gaming having only four gigs of memory running off of the PCIE 4.0 bus but mind you it'll run
on PCIE 3.0 as well along the side here sear number UPC model number all that good stuff
nothing much over here now along the back here two ball bearing for four time greater longevity
talking about the fan this is a single fan design then the mute fan
technology which means if it doesn't hit that temperature which is maybe around 60 degrees
the fan will go ahead actually up 60 degrees Celsius the fan will go ahead
and turn off to make it extra quiet and then key features specifications system requirements
and all that this does require a 400 watt power supply all right so let's go ahead and open it up
wow
this is a teeny tiny card and I’ll get right back to this in one sec
oh okay there is literally nothing else in this box so
yeah okay
by the way the packaging is for their SFC certified packaging for the environment so
good stuff also to mention I prefer when they come in boxes like this because a lot of times
you're paying for all that for something that you might throw away anyway we don't care about this
we care about this so anyway moving this aside
I am upset that there's nothing else in the box but anyway go ahead open this up
all right so teeny tiny card one fan this is a 90 millimeter fan simple enclosure black Radeon again
helping keep the cost down now I paid I think it was right when it was released about 260 for
this one off of NewEgg PowerColor right over here and then we can see the copper tubing down here
copper over here over here over here then we can see the fins
right over here now this has a 2 610 megahertz game clock then a 2,850 megahertz boost clock
16 compute units with 1024 streaming processors and four gigs of gddr6 on a 64-bit bus running at
18 gigabits per second along over here we can see it does support HDMI 2.1 and DP or DisplayPort 1.4
now this does support AMD’s infinity cache and again it does require a 400 watt power supply
and a six pin PCIE connection and let me go ahead and measure this for you real quick now
six inches from the front of the card to the rear of the card and one and a half inches wide
and about four inches wide and I’ll go ahead and put the exact measurements down below as
I’m measuring it we can see along the back of the card super teeny tiny card
over here is where the GPU would be we can see the plain PCB is just incredibly
tiny then over here we're a little bit of that heat will radiate out as well
here as well now I don't suppose this card will get very hot but we will definitely
do some testing but anyway let's get to the installation real quick now before
we can just toss it in our system we need to prepare our system and if we already have
a video card we need to remove that video card we need to remove the old drivers and
then of course prepare the system for brand new drivers so let's get started on that real quick
so first off we're going to open a new browser or a tab and we're going to go to wagnardsoft.com
and then scroll down a little tiny bit and we'll go ahead and click on the latest version here
scroll down a little bit more and click, click here for download and support and then we'll
scroll down a little bit more and finally click official download here now DDU is 100 optional
that it is also 100 recommended so what DDU does is it strips your system of older AMD or NVIDIA or
intel graphics preparing your system for your brand new video card even if it's a brand new
install of windows Microsoft prepares that install with older drivers that way if you don't have
drivers at that minute you at least have basic drivers so you can get going even if you're going
from AMD to AMD I recommend you do this because it gets rid of older drivers that potentially have
issues so let's keep going so now that we've done that we'll go ahead and go to amd.com
drivers and support scroll down a little bit then we'll click graphics AMD Radeon RX 6000 series
then AMD Radeon RX 6500 series and finally AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT and submit then here we can find
our drivers I have windows 11 if you have 10 7 they're all right here and then click download
so now with that done we'll go ahead and close out of here with all the drivers downloaded and we'll
go to the location where our drivers have been downloaded and we'll go ahead and open up DDU just
double click here and we'll go ahead and extract it to a folder called DDU on the root of our c
drive and click extract this will go ahead and create that folder so then we'll just click this
pc, c and then here we can find that folder we just extracted and the drivers we just downloaded
they're right here so now in order to prepare our system we need to go ahead and hold the left
shift key right click on the start button hover over shutdown or sign out and then click restart
you can let go afterwards so now what that does is it takes us to this choose an option
window well we'll go ahead and click troubleshoot advanced options and then select startup settings
and finally we'll go ahead and click restart to the restart to change windows options such as
okay so finally it takes us to this screen the startup settings screen now this is going to
take us into safe mode the three options that we can select are number four which is enable
safe mode number five which is enable safe mode with networking and finally number six
which is enable safe mode with command prompt I’m going to go ahead and select option number four
enable safe mode so the reason we boot into safe mode to uninstall drivers is because
in safe mode there are no drivers running there is only windows basic VGA drivers so
that gives you the perfect environment to uninstall drivers if drivers are running
windows cannot remove them so this gets rid of everything so here we'll go into file explorer
this pc c drive DDU in this folder and then we'll double click on display driver uninstaller
okay here I’m going to go ahead and resize this so that I can see the entire menu first off if you
have an AMD chipset like the x570 550 or whatever chipset you may have you're going to want to go
ahead and uncheck these now in the system we're running an intel chipset so we're just going to go
ahead place checks in all of this which will not only get rid of AMD chipset drivers this will also
get rid of AMD video drivers and now this is for NVIDIA which we can go ahead and do that as well
because we're coming from an NVIDIA video card so this is going to remove everything in video
now scrolling down a little tiny bit we'll see this option prevent download of drivers
from windows update when windows searching for a driver for a device now if there's no check there
place a check there and click ok so what that does it stops windows from downloading
what it considers the latest and greatest video driver and then we'll click
close here over here we'll click on the drop down for select device type and click
GPU now we're removing the EVGA GeForce RTX 3050 so an NVIDIA video card but we can select NVIDIA
AMD or intel now it doesn't hurt to do one then the next then the next I’m going to go
ahead and do NVIDIA and then I’ll do a clean and shut down right over here
so now that the system is shut down we can go ahead and remove the old video card to install
the new video card so the very first thing we're going to want to do is disconnect the
HDMI DP VGA or dvi cable from our old video card then we'll go ahead and turn off the power supply
that way we make sure that there is no power running to the system so that it won't turn on, on
you so then here we'll go ahead and disconnect the PCIE cable now you notice there's a little clamp
right over here that's going ahead and holding the card in place we'll just push it which unlocks
the PCIE cable and then we'll just pull it out and now we'll go ahead and remove
the two screws over here locking the video card in place we'll remove the top one first
and now we'll start on the second one go ahead and
put your hand underneath the card just in case we don't want the card falling out
and when we're done here we're going to want to push in this PCIE locking mechanism let me zoom
in so I can show you a little bit better so this locking mechanism locks the card in place now
not every single motherboard has it but just in case last thing you want to do is
rip the card out which if this is locked we'll also rip the PCIE slot out so what we'll do is
with one hand still holding onto the card we'll push down on this
and that goes ahead and releases the video card so now we can easily
just pull the card out so now since we've removed that previous video card we've left this PCIE
locking mechanism open that way we can easily insert a new video card so we'll go ahead and
match these PCIE fingers with this PCIE slot then we'll go ahead and slide the video card in place
now we are going to need to push to apply a little pressure to slide this card into that
PCIE slot and then also to lock automatically that PCIE locking mechanism and you'll hear it click
not only did you hear a click but you saw it lock in place so now the card isn't going
anywhere even though it isn't going anywhere just in case let's go ahead and screw it in
so the previous video card had an eight pin PCIE but you'll notice this is a six plus two
so we can easily remove two of those eight pins for a six pin now not every single power supply
is going to have that and then we can just easily slide it back in most AMD cards have
the clip along the top where as you saw before we had the clip along the bottom but in this
case on the PowerColor the clip is on the bottom as well so we'll go ahead and just slide that in
and that'll go ahead and lock the PCIE connection right into place now that we
have everything back together we'll go ahead and connect the HDMI cable
right into the video card and we'll go ahead and turn the power supply back
on now with the system back together let's go ahead turn around real quick
so now that we're back in windows if you remember we went ahead and set DDU
to not allow windows update to automatically download what it felt was the best driver so
what we're going to need to do is go into file explorer downloads and we'll double click on that
driver that we just downloaded and click install the AMD driver by the way
and then we'll select additional options even though we use DDU to uninstall the
previous drivers and everything in there I’m going to go ahead and do a factory reset
as well which is basically the same thing but this is just
kind of a double check then we'll click install this is going to go ahead and
remove all old drivers and then reboot our system and now click restart now and then
when we're back in windows it's automatically going to start reinstalling the driver
so I did have to restart the system to disable HDCP on the AMD drivers but I’ll show you just
what I did HDCP or high bandwidth digital content protection is a technology created to stop people
from copying digital media so in this case I’m copying my screen so that I can show it to you so
the minute I installed the AMD driver HDCP kicked in and said whoa you can't copy this
but obviously completely legal so what I had to do was finish the driver install which completed
perfectly fine I clicked finish I restarted my computer disabled HDCP restarted again and then
started recording like you're seeing right now so when you're back in windows after all the restarts
you can go to AMD Radeon software now you can see the full AMD suite now what I did over here real
quick just to show you was I came into the drivers search then I clicked HDCP support
and then I disabled HDCP support and then so coming over here under home we can see the
beginning of all of the software suite last played will show all of our games here we can adjust the
game settings over here then current version up to date status that way you know we could check
over here check for newer drivers AMD link status upgrade advisor all the games installed we'll go
under gaming same thing that we had over here we can launch the game and adjust the global graphics
here are the games and now it found all the games installed and then we can go ahead adjust here if
we wanted to then any compatibility issues over here 6500 it'll work with all the games
performance so we can do some overclocking if we'd like to these are the base metrics
we can tune over here and then some advisors as well coming over here to settings now we have the
entire software suite so just going through all the same again anti-lag at Radeon chill
boost image sharpening enhancing vertical refresh display video all the different features right
over here so after going over the entire software suite we can come back over here under display
enable FreeSync if you have the capability it helps out a ton now I do on this monitor but
because this monitor is going through a capture card I’m stuck at 60 hertz without FreeSync so
enable that if you can and then we can also right click on the desktop go under display settings
then we'll go under advanced display and then choose a refresh rate now if we have higher than
60 hertz definitely set that 120 240 360 whatever you may have again because I’m going through a
capture card I’m stuck at 60 but once I disconnect it I can go on this monitor up to 120 hertz and
that helps performance a ton so in this video I’ve shown you how to remove your old video card remove
your old drivers and then install your brand new video card and install your brand new drivers that
way you don't have anything in the past messing up what you're going to do in the future now
after we've installed all the drivers gotten everything working I also showed you around the
AMD software suite how to enable FreeSync if your monitor supports FreeSync which is another boost
in gaming giving you smoother frame rates and then on top of that I’ve shown you how to increase your
refresh rate so you're not stuck at 60 hertz mind you if your monitor can go higher than 60 hertz in
this case again this monitor can go all the way up to 120 hertz maybe the one you have can do
240 360 520 whatever the next step is but anyway again this is Iggy with ThisBytesForYou showing
you how to install the PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card, Iggy out, see you guys