MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X 8G, 8GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DP

Mit der MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X 8G testen wir heute auf OCinside.de eine AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Grafikkarte. Wir schauen uns wie immer an, was es für Besonderheiten gibt, wie die Karte in Benchmarks abschneidet, wie gut sie übertaktet werden kann, was die dazugehörige Software taugt und endlich gibt es auch Raytracing Benchmarks dazu.

With the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X 8G, we are testing an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card on OCinside.de today. As always, we take a look at the special features, how the card performs in benchmarks, how well it can be overclocked, the capabilities of the bundled software, and finally, there are also ray tracing benchmarks.

The MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X is a solid graphics card. It’s great for 1080p gaming, build quality is top-notch and it has a fantastic cooling solution. The only (real) downside to it is its pricing. Perhaps in the (near) future, pricing would change for the better. If you can spot one for a reasonable price, I don’t have any qualms recommending this graphics card.

In this review we tested the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X, the company's flagship RX 6600 XT card. It comes overclocked out of the box, to a rated boost of 2607 MHz, which is only a small increase over the AMD reference boost of 2589 MHz (+0.6%). In real-life this turns into a 2% performance improvement at 1080p, 3% at 1440p and 4K. Other RX 6600 XT cards we tested don't do much better here. GPU Manufacturers have gotten better and better at eking out the last bits of performance, for the stock card, so additional factory OC potential is rather slim these days.

No matter how long we've been doing this job it never ceases to amaze us at the consistency of modern hardware. Only a few years ago there were enormous differences between certain brands, or just cards produced on a certain day of the week. There were massive steps between cards too, with some being barely good enough to run Minesweeper whilst still proclaiming themselves gaming cards. This unfortunately massively limited the freedom of the consumer to choose the brand they had an affinity with, or even just the product they liked the look of the most.

AMD has done really well with NAVI23, the GPU does as expected and even a little more, it really is a proper gaming card in that Full HD and even WQHD domain. But 379 USD for an entry-level to mainstream level graphics card, holy bejeezus, how times have changed. Too expensive? Yeah, we think so. The cards sits close to RTX 3060 and 5700 XT performance, but only in shading performance. Raw Raytracing performance is a notch slower than the competition offers. Albeit FSR is now available to help a little bit, we can also not apprehend that AMD still has not implemented any form of machine learning super-sampling dedicated in hardware, much like NVIDIA offers Tensor cores. For reasons like RT perf and lacking MLAA, we cast doubt on how AMD is justifying that starting price of 379 USD. You can also argue that while the Infinity cache works most of the time, it's designed to be a workaround to fill an imperfection (128-bit memory bus) and the choice of a more affordable memory type (GDDR6 opposed to GDDR6X), the current AMD GPUs are very memory bandwidth deprived, even with GDDR6 at 16 Gbps, but more so due to the 128 -bit wide memory bus. And that's going to bite this product in the ass every time you get GPU limited, or the32MB L3 cache runs out and gets fewer hits.

The main point to get out of the way right now is that at around a similar price, Nvidia has the lead here. The RTX 3060 (and the Ti) are based on a more established and mature chipset, having much more dialled in and tested drivers, etc. So with time, AMD can claw back a good amount of performance, and we’ve certainly seen them do that with previous launches. However, Nvidia’s cards are either out of stock or cost double MSRP, so it’s hard to really give a smeg on what they can or cannot do.