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 RDNA2 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 RDNA2'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 the RX 6600 XT beating 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 see the RX 6600 XT fall behind quite a bit. The primary reason for that is that the L3 cache is rather small at 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 at those resolutions, the L3 cache performs very well. The same goes for VRAM size. While the RTX 3060 non-Ti does offer 12 GB VRAM, this really has no effect at lower resolutions—AMD's 8 GB VRAM choice is the perfect amount.

In this review we tested the ASUS Radeon RX 6600 XT STRIX OC, the flagship 6600 XT variant from ASUS. It comes overclocked to a rated boost of 2607 MHz out of the box, which is only a small increase over the AMD reference boost of 2589 MHz (+0.6%). In real-life, this turns into a 2% performance improvement at 1080p and 3% at 1440p and 4K.

We have several RX 6600 XT cards here, but we're only allowed to publish results for the ASUS RX 6600 XT at this time. AMD's rules for this launch are that reviews for cards provided by AMD can go live now, while reviews for cards provided by board partners, from stores, or acquired through any other means cannot go live until tomorrow, 3 PM CEST. This a really weird situation because not everybody has received an ASUS card from AMD, so some sites will have reviews up for other manufacturers right now, while we have to wait until tomorrow to publish our results for exactly those cards. As you can imagine, the board partners aren't happy with this approach, either.

Update: We have posted three additional reviews now MSI Gaming X, Sapphire Pulse OC, XFX Merc 308

Other RX 6600 XT custom designs that we've tested achieve similar performance uplifts from their factory OC as the ASUS card. 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 raytracing, 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. Here, NVIDIA definitely has the upper hand. 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 with raytracing. 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 absolutely must enable raytracing at this time to fully enjoy games—they are still developed for RT off; RT on is added at a later stage.

While the ASUS STRIX usually is a totally overbuilt flagship design, I'm not so impressed with the ASUS STRIX RX 6600 XT's cooler. It definitely looks nice and retains the ASUS ROG design language from recent releases, but noise levels are simply much too high. With 41 dBA during gaming, the card is louder than nearly every other graphics cards we've tested in quite a while—too much for a 160 W graphics card. It's also considerably louder than most competing cards from this generation (RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, 6700 XT). Things improve when you activate the "Quiet BIOS". The card now runs at 34 dBA, better, but not good enough. I'm surprised AMD sent me (with the best noise-testing equipment) the ASUS STRIX, probably the loudest RX 6600 XT out there. Other RX 6600 XT cards that we've tested do much better, most MUCH quieter, some even whisper-quiet while achieving the same performance with slightly higher temperatures. Temperatures on the ASUS STRIX are impressive, though; 59°C with the default BIOS and 65°C with the quiet BIOS are super low, but such a fan configuration is not balanced at all. A much better setting would have been to allow 65°C with the default BIOS, which is still cool enough, and 70° or slightly higher with the "quiet" BIOS, for example. This would have achieved great noise levels and given users a meaningful choice between temperature and noise. 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 ASUS STRIX OC, 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. The Radeon RX 6600 XT with its Navi 23 GPU is highly efficient, too, and can match Ampere nicely, which sometimes wasn't easily done with Navi 22 on the RX 6700 XT. Efficiency is similar to the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 even with the ASUS factory overclock, which usually costs a little bit of efficiency. AMD isn't releasing a reference design card for the RX 6600 XT, so we have to base such estimates on the data available from custom designs, but it's close enough. 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.

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

Overclocking worked very well on the ASUS STRIX. We gained 9% in real-life performance, which is the best OC result for all RX 6660 XT cards tested so far. 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 these new memory chips having 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 any way. At this time, the RTX 3060 sells for $550, 3060 Ti for $700, and RX 6700 XT for $770. That's why I estimate the actual market price of 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 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, and $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. Also, there's some competition from the RX 6700 XT, which outperforms the RX 6600 XT, as it can currently be found for $770.

According to ASUS, the RX 6600 XT STRIX OC will sell for an MSRP of $550, which is $170 higher than the AMD base price. To me, this is more confirmation that $380 is way too optimistic and that ASUS wants a piece of the pie for themselves. I estimate that the ASUS STRIX will end up selling for around $700, possibly lower, 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?