Introduction

The XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Speedster Merc 308 is the company's most premium custom-design implementation of the newest kid on the gaming graphics card block. The RX 6600 XT is designed to be just about everything the plethora of PC gamers still on Full HD (1080p) monitors need, as it brings with it the ability to play AAA games at the highest settings with Full HD. It's also capable of raytracing, which should set you up for premium AAA or e-sports gameplay when combined with FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). XFX combines the RX 6600 XT with its most premium cooling solution and highest factory-overclocked speeds.



The Radeon RX 6600 XT debuts AMD's smallest GPU from this generation to the consumer space, the 7 nm "Navi 23." This chip is armed with up to 2,048 stream processors spread across 32 RDNA2 compute units and 32 Ray Accelerators, which are maxed out on the RX 6600 XT. 8 GB is the standard memory size for this SKU; however, it is across a narrow 128-bit wide memory interface. Even with a memory speed of 16 Gbps, this only works out to 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth. To make up for this, AMD deployed 32 MB of its Infinity Cache on-die memory, which accelerates the memory subsystem. Thanks to these specifications, particularly the narrow memory bus, the RX 6600 XT has a typical board power draw as low as 160 W, so the card can make do with a single 8-pin PCIe power input.

The XFX Speedster Merc 308 is a slick, racy looking card that's triple-slot and triple-fan, which has it look a segment above when installed in your case. The card uses a long aluminium fin-stack heatsink, which is longer than the PCB underneath, so much of the airflow from the third fan flows through the card and out vents on the backplate. AMD is pricing the RX 6600 XT at a steep starting price of $379, and the Merc 308 goes for $410. These are tough prices given the RX 5600 XT debuted at just $279 and the RX 560 at a stunning $99. In this review, we square the RX 6600 XT off against a vast selection of graphics cards, including the RTX 3060 and other RX 6600 XT cards.