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 Radeon hd5970 and GeForce 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 dollars
am i in a time loop oh man not a
maybe if i review it it'll stop or maybe if i tell you about our sponsor i fix it
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 tool kit
at the end of the video
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 6800 xt 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 it got eight gigabytes of gddr6 memory 32 compute
units and as many megs of infinity cache and all the goodies that come with rd
and a2 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
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 AMD 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 rank memory is good for you
you should try it helps keep ryzen fit 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 percent 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
all the same none of these results are especially bad to be clear the lowest non-ray tracing
result was still well over 60fps and one percent 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 the trade blows with the rx 6700 xt it's no surprise that the cut down 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 the energy and medical tests
in specuperf 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 ltdstore.com for thermals considering
neither the cooling nor the clocks are stock and this car is 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 360 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 rumors suggested they're 100 per shell
you can even see where they stop 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 card edge 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 x 16 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 could safely mod the card for use in a server
chassis or something without losing any functionality the pins simply are not
connected but now we've got to 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 36t 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 msrp2 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 does rock 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 6600xt 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 to
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 is a great
basic kit for new users it gives you what you need for the most essential
electronics repairs in a compact size that includes the most popular precision
bits they're all held in place with high density foam so you can throw it around
without any of the bits falling out they've got a lifetime warranty so
go ahead and get one today at ifixit.com LTT
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