Two months ago for the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT launch, we saw the latest mid-range card outperforming high-end cards like the 1080 Ti from a few generations back. The steam survey has 67% of users currently gaming at 1080p and for a lot of them even the RX 6600 XT is more than they need, AMD is launching today the RX 6600 which might fit the bill. It is focused on 1080p performance and runs on the same Navi 23 GPU that the 6600 XT has, with a few things cut back. Today I’m going to check out how the PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter that AMD sent over-performs as well as check out what PowerColor has to offer on their reference clocked option as far as cooling and noise performance goes.
Product Name: PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter
Review Sample Provided by: AMD and PowerColor
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE
What is the RX 6600 all about?
To get an idea of where the RX 6600 stands I have the specs broken down with the RX 6600 XT and the last generation RX 5600 XT as well. All three were built on the 7nm manufacturing process and you can see that the 6600 XT and the 6600 share a lot of the same specs because they both have the same NAVI 23 GPU so things like transistor count and die size are the same. Where they differ is with the number of compute units being used which also affects the ray accelerator count as well. The 6600 XT had 32 of each and the 6600 is 12.5% less at 28 of each. That cut the stream precessors down to 1792 from 2048 as well. They also changed up the clock speeds. The 6600XT ran at 2359 MHz with a boost clock of up to 2589 MHz but the RX 6600 runs at a slower 2044 MHz clock speed and the boost clock is 2491 MHz. That is a drop of 13% on the game clock and the boost clock stays a lot closer with a drop of just 3.7%.
They have the same 32MB infinity cache and on the memory side of things the same 8GB of GDDR6 which is 2GB more than the older RX 5600 XT. They both have the same 128-bit memory interface but you can see that the memory bandwidth is lower on the RX 6600. This is because it has a lower memory clock speed which wasn’t provided in the AMD specification listing, but our card ran at 1750 MHz for the RX 6600 and 2000 MHz for the RX 6600 XT. Both cards support PCIe 4.0 and only need an x8 interface where the older 5600 XT needed PCIe 4.0 16x. Then for board power, the RX 6600 is listed at 132 watts and the higher clock speeds of the 6600 XT have it at 160 watts.
Specifications |
AMD Radeon RX 6600 |
AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT |
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT |
Architecture |
RDNA 2 |
RDNA 2 |
RDNA |
Manufacturing Process |
7nm |
7nm |
7nm |
Transistor Count |
11.1 billion |
11.1 Billion |
10.3 Billion |
Die Size |
237 mm² |
237 mm² |
251 mm² |
Compute Units |
28 |
32 |
36 |
Ray Accelerators |
28 |
32 |
- |
Stream Processors |
1792 |
2048 |
2304 |
Game GPU Clock |
Up to 2044 MHz |
Up to 2359 MHz |
Up to 1375 MHz |
Boost GPU Clock |
Up to 2491 MHz |
Up to 2589 MHz |
Up to 1560 MHz |
Peak Single Precision Performance |
Up to 8.93 TFLOPS |
Up to 10.6 TFLOPS |
Up to 7.19 TFLOPS |
Peak Half Precision Performance |
Up to 17.86 TFLOPS |
Up to 21.21 TFLOPS |
Up to 14.4 TFLOPS |
Peak Texture Fill-Rate |
Up to 279.0 GT/s |
Up to 331.4 GS/s |
Up to 224.6 GT/s |
ROPs |
64 |
64 |
64 |
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate |
Up to 159.4 GP/s |
Up to 165.7 GP/s |
Up to 99.8 GP/s |
AMD Infinity Cache |
32 MB |
32 MB |
- |
Memory |
8GB GDDR6 |
8GB GDDR6 |
6GB GDDR6 |
Memory Bandwidth (up to) |
224 GB/s |
256 GB/s |
288 GB/s |
Memory Interface |
128-bit |
128-bit |
192-bit |
PCIe Interface |
PCIe 4.0 x8 |
PCIe 4.0 x8 |
PCIe 4.0 x16 |
Board Power |
132W |
160W |
150W |
Before diving into the testing, I do like to double-check with GPUz to make sure that our card is running at the clock speeds that it should be at and the PowerColor RX 6600 Fighter is running at 2044 MHz with a boost clock of 2491 MHz which fits the AMD reference clocks perfectly. I also include this so our firmware revision is documented and as well as the driver tested with which is the Adrenalin 21.30.17.06 that was provided to press for launch.