Radeon RX 6600 XTs Available at Micro Center, Hard to Find Elsewhere

The Radeon RX 6600 XT launch day is here, and availability is both great and terrible, depending on the retailer. Online retailers did not have any RX 6600 XT graphics cards for sale at 9AM EST (the card's release time). The 6600 XT might not be one of the best graphics cards based on specs and performance, and it sits at about the same level as the Radeon RX 5700 XT in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, but if you can actually find cards in stock, that's better than most other GPUs.

All of Micro Center's brick-and-mortar stores apparently received a relatively large amount of industry. Our GPU reviewer checked out his local store in Denver, where they initially had over 100 RX 6600 XT cards for the launch, with many still available for purchase. It's the largest number of graphics cards Micro Center has received for a launch during the past year, according to some employees.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT is AMD's latest upper-mid-range graphics card packing 2048 cores, 32 CUs, and 8GB of GDDR6 memory at an MSRP of $380. This card is AMD's cheapest RDNA 2 graphics card to date and offers performance that lands between the RTX 3060 12GB and RTX 3060 Ti, depending on the game. In our review, we were concerned the card would sell out just as fast as other Ampere and RDNA 2 GPUs did, but so far that hasn't been the case.

We received information from Rich Carroll, Merchandise manager for Micro Center, who informed us that there were more than 2,000 RX 6600 XT graphics cards available across all of its 25 locations nationwide and that, as of 3:40 PM ET, every store still had stock. We confirmed this by going to a MicroCenter in Denver, Colorado, where dozens of RX 6600 XT cards remained on store shelves, just waiting to be purchased.

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At the location we checked, oddly, it was mostly the most expensive models that were all sold out. The Asus cards were gone, as were the MSI Gaming X and PowerColor Red Devil. There was only a single Sapphire Nitro+ left, and a few Gigabyte Gaming Pro cards. Meanwhile, there were at least a dozen or more PowerColor Fighter and Hellhound cards, and plenty of Gigabyte Eagle and Gaming cards. We can't speak to availability at other stores, but the cards seem to be moving off store shelves relatively quickly. If you have a local Micro Center near you, it's probably best to start driving as soon as possible.

It's great to see Micro Center getting a healthy complement of RX 6600 XTs on launch day, giving local customers a chance to finally get a graphics card at MSRP. However, the same cannot be said of online retailers. Checking out the Radeon RX 6600 XT on Amazon, Memory Express, and other vendors results in listings either showcasing unavailability with no pricing, or no cards listings at all. Newegg had 15 cards listed, but all were shown as out of stock — they were apparently sold via the Newegg Shuffle.

That leaves the pre-built market (see best gaming PCs) as the only online solution to purchase an RX 6600 XT, with several vendors already marketing RX 6600 XT machines including CyberPowerPC, CLX Gaming, and AVA Direct.

It appears scalpers have not had any luck acquiring the new graphics cards either with eBay.com showing just one listing for a scalped RX 6600 XT at $699.99, with no other listings so far. That will almost certainly change in the coming days, and we're definitely curious to see where pricing lands in our GPU price index.

If you're a European resident, you might have better luck purchasing an RX 6600 XT. ebuyer.com has a couple of Sapphire and MSI RX 6600 XT's in stock right now with prices ranging from €369.99 to €419.99. Other European retailers also have stock.

Unfortunately for U.S. buyers, neither AMD nor its AIB partners seem to have managed to supply online retailers with sufficient quantities of cards. We're not sure if AMD's strategy was to only ship cards in bulk to Micro Center, or perhaps the online stores are just putting the cards into bundles or other ways of limiting purchase. For its part, Micro Center has a policy of only selling one GPU to an individual every 30 days — one of any GPU model, so you can't buy an RX 6600 XT and a GTX 1050 Ti, which was the only other GPU in stock in Denver (at a laughable $299.99).

Hopefully, AMD can continue making enough RX 6600 XT's to reduce Nvidia's domination in the mid-range market. We weren't super excited with a mid-range card that often sells for over $400, but in this market, getting performance roughly on the level of the RTX 2070, and generally ahead of the RTX 3060, is about as good as it gets. Whether prices will remain that low remains to be seen.