Overall and Final Verdict
While AMD's new refresh isn’t any new silicon, the bump in clock speeds especially with our overclocked MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X was enough to show a big performance improvement when compared to the original RX 6600 XT that we took a look at. That difference was especially noticeable in our game benchmarks where the 6600 XT and the RTX 3060 used to trade blows the 6650 XT is out ahead consistently. This translates to 1080p performance that should handle anything you throw at it and even at 1440p, the 6650 XT didn’t do too bad as long as you are a little careful with settings on the most demanding games. The performance improvement didn’t make much of a difference when we got into the compute tests.
As far as the MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X goes, MSI didn’t change anything up with the design so if you love the gamer-focused angular designs you will love the styling on the RX 6650 XT Gaming X. I wish that some of the RGB accents from the higher end Gaming X cards were on the RX 6650 XT Gaming X, it only has the backlit logo up on top. For cooling the RX 6650 XT Gaming X did well, especially when testing with the stock fan profile which was right on point. The cooler being the same as the RX 6600 XT before does mean there wasn’t much headroom left when I turned the fan speeds up. But given how cool it was running overall you could still edge a little more performance out with an overclock without any worries. With the cooler working a little harder than normal the RX 6650 XT Gaming X didn’t top the charts for noise and was a little loud when I tested in the 50% fan speed range which is unusual for the Gaming X cards. The higher clock speed and the overclock on our card also didn’t help things when it came to power usage which were relatively high.
For the last few years, GPU pricing has been just all over the place with relatively exciting MSRPs combined with out of this world pricing in the real world. That pricing has started to come down and with the 6650 XT launch, AMD is suggesting that the cards will start at $399. The MSI RX 6650 XT Gaming X on the other hand is listed at the launch today at $449.99 so you are paying a little bit of a premium for the small overclock and the cooling performance. But at least we are back to real-world pricing. For comparison, the RTX 3060’s are starting at $429.99 on Newegg right now, and given what we have seen for performance this makes the RX 6650 XT a solid deal. AMD has also announced their “Raise the Game” bundle which should add a free game into the mix as well.
Live Pricing: HERE
