[Hardware]POWERCOLOR RADEON RX 6600 FIGHTER REVIEW

[Ronaldskk.]

 

 

 

AMD was long the dominant force in budget graphics cards and often able to sweep the charts in contests of performance-per-dollar versus Nvidia. As of late, however, neither company has focused all that much on the cheaper side of things (thanks, global chip shortage) and that's left us with a growing void of cheaper chips.

 

But there are some that straddle the ephemeral concept of 'entry-level' today. AMD already offers the $379 RX 6600 XT and Nvidia's cheapest is the $329 RTX 3060. Both far from entry-level as we once knew it, but that's what we're working with, and what AMD is up against with the RX 6600.

 

 

AMD RADEON RX 6600 SPECIFICATIONS

What are the AMD Radeon RX 6600 specs?

The Radeon RX 6600 neatly fills a gap beneath the Radeon RX 6600 XT in the red team's RX 6000-series line-up, and it's safe to say there are few, if any, real surprises here when comparing the two cards. There are a few differences to note between the two, though, those which make it all the more important to consider stretching to the extra bucks of the XT model, if possible.

 

 

 

First off, the major similarities. AMD's RDNA 2 architecture is the company's best to date, and it's already found its way into an impressive line-up of graphics cards, including the impressive Radeon RX 6900 XT and Microsoft and Sony's latest consoles. It is, of course, also the architecture powering the RX 6600 XT and RX 6600.

 

 

If you want to read more about the RDNA 2 architecture, I recommend you check out our Radeon RX 6800 XT review. That's where we explore its changes and improvements in more detail.

 

AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card on colourful background.

 

 

This architecture's inclusion is a good thing, generally, as the RDNA 2 architecture has proven itself an impressive step up over AMD's first-generation RDNA. For the RX 6600 specifically, the RDNA 2 architecture comes in handy when it comes to pushing performance per watt, which as you'll see later in this review, falls in the RX 6600's favour versus the RTX 3060 12GB.

 

RX 6600 SPECS

 

 

GPU: Navi 23

Compute Units: 28

Stream Processors: 1,792

Infinity Cache: 32 MB

Memory: 8 GB GDDR6

Memory bus: 128-bit

TBP: 132 W

MSRP: $329

 

The RX 6600 comes with a 132W TBP (total board power), and AMD recommends it be paired with at least a 450W PSU. That's lower than Nvidia's RTX 3060 TBP of 170W, which it recommends gets paired up with a 550W PSU. In some circumstances, then, that could be a helpful money saver.

 

 

On the power front, then, all is rosy. But these modest power demands come at a larger cost elsewhere, and are seemingly down to a reduction in core count and clock speed.

 

The RX 6600 is a far cry from the 5,120 cores of the Navi 21 chip found in the RX 6000-series top card. Instead, it comes with a pared-back version of the same Navi 23 GPU as the RX 6600 XT. The RX 6600 comes with 1,792 cores (28 CUs), down from 2,048 (32 CUs) in the RX 6600 XT.

 

 

 

It might not seem like much, but four CUs at this grade can make for a sizeable loss in performance, and the RX 6600 loses out in other ways to its XT sibling, too.

 

For one, it's not as blisteringly fast as we're used to seeing. The RX 6600 comes with a reference boost clock of 2,491MHz, which is also the max boost clock for our Powercolor review unit. The Game Clock—which is the clock speed AMD expects you to hit while gaming—is set to a more modest 2,044MHz.

 

That's still impressively over the 2GHz mark, which has been a feat all RDNA 2 GPUs have achieved through some careful and clever tinkering. Though it is shy of the RX 6600 XT, which manages 2,589MHz boost and 2,359MHz game clock.

 

Under actual gaming conditions, we saw the RX 6600 easily smash its Game Clock, regularly hitting 2,337MHz, but that's still around 300MHz slower than the actual in-game clock speed of the RX 6600 XT.

 

 

 

What this all means is that the RX 6600 slips behind the RX 6600 XT in-game by a decent margin, as you'll see in the performance graphs below.

 

However, potentially one upside to the RX 6600's slimmer specs is this could allow for more slimmed-down coolers from AMD's partners—even the relatively minimal cooler on our reference Powercolor Fighter manages to keep this card at a surprisingly low temperature during operation. I'd like to think that will mean more RX 6600 graphics cards at or around MSRP, but in today's wild west of graphics card retail that's not something I can say with any real certainty.

 

It's also worth noting that both the RX 6600 and the RX 6600 XT use a PCIe 4.0 x8 connection, and what this means is the graphics card only has the physical pins for an 8x connection, not the amount required for the more standard x16 one. That's no issue if you're running a PCIe 4.0 compatible PC, but plug this card into a PCIe 3.0 slot and it may drop some performance. There's unlikely to be much in it, a frame or two, but just keep this in mind when comparing scores, especially at 4K.

 

 

Pair this card with any modern AMD Ryzen CPU and you are set to benefit, and you'll also be able to notch your performance upwards a touch through the use of Smart Access Memory (SAM).

 

For the record, our test bench is powered by an Intel 10th Gen gaming chip and Z590 chipset, and thus does not offer PCIe 4.0 compatibility.