At this year’s ChinaJoy gaming conference in Shanghai (think E3, but focused more on local Chinese developers and projects), AMD announced the upcoming August release of its all-new graphics card, the Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Set to take over the mantle of 1080p-gaming specialist from the aging Radeon RX 5600 XT, the Radeon RX 6600 XT aims dead-on for the largest segment of the PC-gaming market: Gamers and esports hounds with full-HD monitors. But how well will the RX 6600 XT slot in against the current GPU competition in this hotly contested, high-volume category?
Let’s stack up what we currently know about the RX 6600 XT against AMD’s next-step-up and previous-generation models, as well as the closest Nvidia competition…
At an introductory list price of $379 (which likely will only go higher on the street, depending on the third-party card design in question and the seemingly inevitable scalper tax), the Radeon RX 6600 XT finds itself in competition with strong entries from Nvidia. AMD reps, in a press briefing, themselves positioned the card between the GeForce RTX 3060 and the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Indeed, the card falls between the $329 and $399 list prices for those models.
That’s a tight spot. In the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, for just $20 more than the Radeon RX 6600 XT (if you gauge based on list prices, anyway), Nvidia buyers could get a card that looks, at least on a spec sheet, considerably more powerful. The RTX 3060 Ti has the same amount and type of VRAM as the RX 6600 XT, but its memory bandwidth and bus size look like they could easily outpace AMD on performance, and not just by a few dollars’ worth of frame rates.
We’ll just have to wait until we get our hands on one to find out what this card can really do against Nvidia’s Editors’ Choice-winning lineup of 30 Series GPUs.
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT: Pricing and Availability
Speaking of actually being able to get your hands on one of these, when should you mark your calendar to put aside a day to line up at your local Best Buy? And which models will you be able to buy?
We saw what AMD called an “artist’s render” of an RX 6600 XT reference board during our briefing. But don’t plan on buying one. An AMD representative stated that the company will not offer any actual AMD-branded reference cards at time of launch. This card line will be 100% third-party designs.
Following from that, AMD has opted to let its add-in-board (AIB) partners take the brunt of the endless “Why are you out of stock?!?” emails and social-media posts that will flood in (if recent history serves) mere minutes after the cards go live. Expect boards from the usual AMD AIB suspects, including Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX.
When, exactly, you should expect those “Buy Now” buttons to activate on your checkout carts? Set your alarms and get those bots ready: The RX 6600 XT launches on the morning of August 11, though the times that online retailers open the digital gates to shoppers will vary depending on where you are in the world.
Stay tuned to PCMag for our day-one review of the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT as we put it through its paces, and see if it’s really worth that price bump for both high-refresh and AAA 1080p gamers alike.
