Tested product: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle
Award: Costs SEK 5,299 on Inet
AMD launched the latest generation graphics card, the Radeon RX 6000 series, with a couple of real performance monsters a year ago. They have since gradually released simpler and cheaper models. Now comes their most price-squeezed 6000 graphics circuit to date, the Radeon RX 6600. It should not be confused with the RX 6600 TX that we tested a little over a month ago, but this is another step down in performance and price.
Rating 3 out of 5
Opinion
While the RX 6600 XT was well suited for you with a fast 1080p screen, the RX 6600 is for you who are content with 1080p resolution and 60 fps in your games. Because that is exactly what it delivers exactly what you need. Although not much more. Gigabyte’s nonsense-free Eagle card fits well here with a relatively low price and function over flashiness. However, we wonder if it would have needed so many and so aggressive fans.
–
Positively
- Just right for 60 fps at 1080p
- Affordable basic performance
- Power efficient and relatively cool
–
Negative
- Forget radiation tracking
- Get games with Fidelity FX support
- Excessively aggressive cooling
—
Our tested card comes from Gigabyte and is called Radeon RX 6600 Eagle. It runs the graphics processor at standard clock frequency and if you want to experiment with overclocking, you have to do it on your own. We did not do that in our test, but simply plugged in the card, installed drivers and drove.
The first impression of Gigabyte’s RX 6600 card is the same as we got when we tested Gigabytes of Geforce GTX 3060 cards. It’s the most energy efficient and cool from each GPU family, but Gigabyte still chooses to equip it with three of their extra cooling – efficient, but also somewhat loud, Windforce fans.
It feels excessive in a card like this, and we think the manufacturer would have easily gotten away with two larger but quieter fans instead. It works Asus in its Radeon RX 6600 XT card which we tested earlier. The card is not very large in dimensions, but in really compact computer boxes there is a risk that it will not fit. However, all normal-sized cans can house it by a good margin.
Muted with the right program
At first we are also worried about very aggressive cooling. With completely stationary fans or full blows, and nothing in between. Bios obviously has no internal modulation of fan speeds, but we need to install Gigabyte’s standard graphics card control program Aorus Engine to enable automatic fan control.
Then the fan cooling is significantly reduced. But it can still be noticeably loud from time to time during a game session. The need for an Aorus Engine is not mentioned anywhere in the card’s installation instructions. But the card has not been officially released yet when we test it, so maybe better documentation will follow for a regular customer.
The Eagle cards have a practical and simple design. Here we do not find flashing diodes or glowing logos as on so many other graphics cards, but this is a card for you who open the computer once and install your components and then do not care what it looks like in there, as long as it works. You need an extra eight-pin pcie power cable on the top, and Gigabyte recommends at least a 500-watt power supply in your computer, which is not so much. But it can of course depend on what else you have installed.
More practical than spectacular
The card has a matt, dark gray plastic shell that encapsulates circuit boards and protects from dust and other damage, but which does nothing extra as a heat sink. However, it is not needed as a pair of its heat sinks are well exposed and can passively dissipate a lot of heat. We avoid fan noise during ordinary office work and surfing, and it is also mostly fan-free in creative programs that use graphics cards.
It remains to be seen what price the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle will land in stores in the long run. Given the still acute component shortage, it is unclear exactly what you will have to pay for one. But if we look at official resellers for Gigabyte’s cards that have a fixed price and do not add usury margins, we can state that the Radeon RX 6600 XT Eagle costs between SEK 4,890 and 5,400, so a few hundred bucks below that is not unreasonable.
Right at the start of sales, however, only one Swedish store lists the card, for SEK 5,299. That still makes the RX 6600 one of the cheapest modern graphics cards you can buy right now, even though five thousand dollars is still a not insignificant sum. But it is simply not possible to build a real budget gaming PC right now. It will not be cheaper than this if you do not manage to get a good deal on an older graphics card.
Play stably at 60 fps
So what do you get for your money? Like the RX 6600 XT, the RX 6600 is adapted for full HD displays at 1,920 x 1,080 pixels. But where the XT model was well suited (with some compromises) to play with a high frame rate at that resolution, the RX 6600 is rather for you who have a 60 Hz screen that you like and have no interest in switching up at that point .
Not everyone is a die-hard gamer and many do well without extra frame rate and super-fast response times. They play on the office screen and are fully satisfied with it. But if you want to make sure that the games you actually run still look as good as possible, a card like this may be the right choice.
We test the card against a 60 Hz screen with 1080p resolution and good colors but without extra fast image processing, and against a gaming-oriented 120 Hz screen. And with a few exceptions, we maximize 60 frames per second in modern games without having to compromise on graphics quality.
Demanding titles such as Read Dead Redemption 2, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Cyberpunk 2077, we have to adjust the settings a bit so that the computer will consistently keep up without lost frame rate. But then we are talking about small adjustment of edge smoothing or activation of FidelityFX CAS in games that support it. It allows you to render the game in a slightly lower resolution but then scale up to a nice experience. Unfortunately, not all of them, so often we have to resort to other ways to reduce effects instead.
Or faster, sometimes
In most games, however, we can avoid it completely and maximize all settings without affecting performance. Many games like Death Stranding, Ori and the Will of the Wisp, Borderlands 3 and Dirt 5 float at up to 100 fps if your screen can handle it. On average, the card basically matches the much more expensive Geforce RTX 3060, both when we run DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games.
The exception is just like for all AMD card beam tracking that we either have to turn off or run very sparingly, otherwise it reduces game performance to cinema frequency, ie below 30 frames per second. The RX 6600 XT did not do this either, and more expensive RX 6000 cards only make it helpful, so we do not expect anything here. We simply have to wait for the next generation of Radeon architecture before they can seriously give Nvidia a match on that point.
On the other hand, it is not such an important factor in all games, and even games that use the technology diligently look good without. If you have high ambitions at that point, you still need at least one RTX 3060 ti card, and you have to pay a lot extra for it. If you do not have it, the RX 6600 is a choice that is gentle on your wallet. But we had hoped for a slightly lower maximum volume from the fans in Gigabyte’s building.
Specifications
Product name: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle
Tested: October 2021
Product type: Graphics card
Manufacturer: Gigabyte
Graphics processor: AMD Radeon RX 6600
Interface: Pcie 4.0 x16
Connections: 2st displayport 1.4, 2st hdmi 2.1
Memory: 8 GB gddr6
Extra software: Aorus Engine
Length: 282 mm
Award: Costs SEK 5,299 on Inet
Performance (In computer with i9-9900K / 16 GB frame)
Geekbench 5 (Open GL): 65 106 points
3dmark Time Spy (DirectX 12): 8 250 points
3dmark Fire Strike (DirectX 11): 20,470 points
3dmark Port Royal (RTX beam tracking): 3 372 points
– .
