Introduction

AMD today debuted the Radeon RX 6600 graphics card, a quick addition to the company's latest generation of GPUs that restores competition across all price points in the GPU space. The RX 6600 is a follow-up to the RX 6600 XT launch from August. It's being positioned as a pure-1080p performance-segment card that lets you play any of today's AAA or e-sports titles with fairly high settings, at 1080p with 60 Hz. Given 1080p continues to be the most popular gaming resolution some 12 years in the running, this card has its task cut out.



The Radeon RX 6600 is based on the same 7 nm Navi 23 silicon as the RX 6600 XT. While its bigger sibling maxes out the silicon, enabling all 32 RDNA2 compute units and 2,048 stream processors, the new RX 6600 comes with 28 out of 32 CUs enabled, which works out to 1,792 stream processors. It has the same amount of memory at 8 GB, across the same 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, and also has the same 32 MB on-die Infinity Cache memory. The only difference is memory speeds. The RX 6600 gets 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory instead of the 16 Gbps memory of the RX 6600 XT (224 GB/s vs. 256 GB/s bandwidth).

As you'll notice above, the Radeon RX 6600 lacks a reference design, and the launch is being handled entirely by AMD's board partners. We have with us the PowerColor Radeon RX 6600 Fighter, the company's most affordable custom RX 6600 implementation. It comes with a rather basic-looking design, a cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a pair of fans, and, importantly, compact dimensions of under 20 cm in length, 2-slot thickness, and full-height (no taller). The card draws power from a single 8-pin power connector and sticks to AMD reference clock speeds. AMD is pricing the RX 6600 at a starting price (read: fantasy price) of $330, which is $50 cheaper than the RX 6600 XT. In the real world, we expect this card to be priced north of $600.