MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X 8 GB GDDR6 Graphics Card Review – A Pricey RX 5600 XT Upgrade

Conclusion - Should've Been Under $350 US

MSI's Radeon RX 6600 series custom graphics cards are finally here and I got the chance to test out the Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X. While MSI offered its Gaming X Trio cooler on the Big Navi GPUs, the smaller Navi 2X variants will be receiving the Twin Frozr Gaming X coolers. The cooler while compact, is a fully loaded design that retains the great cooling performance and has a custom-built PCB that offers a lot of overclocking potential.

The sample I received featured a factory overclock of 2607 MHz which is an 18 MHz overclock over the reference clocks but the average clock rates peaked around 2.8 GHz. You can further push the card through manual overclocking and gain an additional 2-3% performance boost along with SAM that adds an average 7.5% performance gain in several titles that I tested. However, the card runs at a really high clock speed out of the box leaving little headroom for overclocking.

As for the cooling solution, the new Gaming X design does a pretty good job keeping the card just under 45C even in stress tests. For gaming, the average temperatures were around 42C which is quite impressive, and at around 30dbA. The power consumption of the Radeon RX 6600 XT is also very low, coming in at sub-200W and close to the RTX 3060 while offering much better performance at 1080p.

The card isn't that bulky and should fit inside most cases with relative ease and the dual-fan solution comes with 0db fan technology which unless or until you're touching 60C won't spin at all. This allows lower noise levels when you're not doing any graphics-intensive tasks. MSI went all the way by including a full metal backplate on the card.

The RX 6600 XT generally tends to perform better and run cooler than the GeForce RTX 3060 and even manages to offer faster performance than the RTX 30600 Ti in a few titles with AMD's FSR tech-enabled. Of course, NVIDIA retains its lead in raytracing titles but with FSR, you can definitely close in on the competition. SAM is a feature worth looking at if you're using an AMD Ryzen 5000 or Ryzen 3000 CPU platform.

The AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is also primarily a 1080p graphics card and that's noticeable as its performance doesn't scale linearly when moving to higher resolutions. At 1440p, the performance gets weaker compared to the RTX 3060 and at 4K, the RTX 3060 can outrightly beat the card in several AAA titles. That's due to the limited 128-bit bus interface and a 32 MB Infinity Cache that runs at a lower clock speed than the Navi 22 and Navi 23 GPUs. The limited bandwidths will affect the card when running high-resolution and higher-textures that affect streaming bandwidth. As such, the card is only a viable gaming option at 1080p, if you are looking something up, then the RTX 3060 Ti is the better overall choice here.

Another limitation on the Radeon RX 6600 XT is that it has a PCIe x8 interface and while most modern gaming PCs support PCIe Gen 4 slots, running the card on a Gen 3 motherboard would lead to adverse performance due to limited PCIe bandwidth.

The pricing of the card is also way out of the park, with an MSRP of $379 US for the reference, $559 US for the Gaming X (MSI), & realistically, beyond that in the retail segment depending on the GPU stock in your region. Even compared to the RX 5600 XT which launched at $279 US, we are talking a $100 US higher price point for RDNA 2. This makes the card not that good of a deal when it comes to performance/$. If AMD had priced it close to $320 US, this would've been a great option over the RTX 3060 but unfortunately, the 3060 offers more value and has more capacity too. So overall, MSI has a great RX 6600 XT custom solution in the form of its Gaming X which has a really compact and SFF-friendly design and runs cooler than anything we have tested so far but the pricing is way too high!

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.