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Meet the XFX RX 6600 Speedster SWFT 210
The Radeon RX 6600 will only be available from AMD's add-in board (AIB) partners. For the launch review, AMD sent us the XFX Radeon RX 6600 SWFT 210. We don't see a lot of XFX cards for review, though we've tested various models in the past. XFX is a tier-two graphics card manufacturer, basically the AMD GPU equivalent of a Zotac card. We can't say much about their support, but in general we'd expect the larger brands like Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, MSI, and Sapphire to be more readily available at retail.
AMD's Radeon Software reports a maximum boost clock of 2704MHz, but what the software says and what the official specs say doesn't usually match up — different ways of reporting boost, basically. The official boost clock for the card is 2491MHz, and that's pretty close to what we saw in our power and temperature testing later on. We're told that all the cards AMD sampled reviewers have the same game and boost clocks, so as far as we know this is as close as we'll get to a 'reference' design.
The XFX RX 6600 SWFT has a relatively compact design, which you'd expect from something with a 132W TDP rating. It's a dual-slot card that measures 243x114x39 mm and weighs 615g, a featherweight compared to some of the chunkier graphics cards we've tested. The card's equipped with two custom fans, both 95mm in diameter. The fans are unremarkable, meaning they should get the job done but they're not high static pressure designs and don't feature integrated rims.
Aesthetically, this card defines barebones. There's no RGB lighting, or any lighting at all. Some will appreciate that fact, but fans of bling will want to look for other options. Video ports consist of three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1 outputs. There's a single 8-pin power connector, more than enough for the card's needs. There's also a toggle switch that appears to swap between two VBIOS chips — it's not labeled but the manual says, "If your card comes equipped with a dual BIOS…"
Speaking of the manual, the small pamphlet doesn't tell you much. It's a generic pamphlet that's apparently for all XFX graphics cards, not for this specific model. For most users, that's not important, but including a digital file that's specific to the card model would be better. Like I was saying, though, this is a very barebones card and packaging, and I'd assume it's one of the $329 models that will go on sale today.
Test Setup for Radeon RX 6600
Our test hardware hasn't changed (yet… waiting for either Alder Lake or Zen 4 before making the switch and retesting everything). We're still running Windows 10 (21H1, build 19043.1237). We're also using motherboard BIOS version 7B12v1B1, which includes beta resizable BAR support (aka, 'ReBAR'). We tested the RX 6600 XT on both AMD Ryzen 5900X and Intel Core i9-9900K system, but the differences were generally small so we'll confine our testing to just the usual Intel PC this time. We did notice that the x8 PCIe Gen4 connection on Navi 23 does seem to hinder performance a bit, so you can probably eke out a bit better performance with a more recent platform that supports PCIe Gen4.
We're sticking with the same 13 games we've been using since the RTX 3080 launch, all with DXR (DirectX Raytracing) disabled. We have a second test suite that includes DXR in ten games (plus we've also tested Far Cry 6, with and without DXR) for those curious about how the RX 6600 holds up with maxed out graphics settings and ray tracing. This card definitely isn't built for that sort of workload, unless maybe you're running at 1280x720, but we gave it a shot anyway. We're also skipping the FSR and DLSS testing for this review, as we've covered that elsewhere in the past and things haven't really changed.
We're also getting ready to revamp our test suite that we use for both the GPU benchmarks hierarchy as well as individual graphics card reviews. Many of the games are several years old, and frankly testing 24 different games at various settings is a bit much. This will very likely be the last new GPU launched in 2021, unless Nvidia decides to finally trot out RTX 3050 desktop cards, so at least that should give us a chance to retest everything for the new suite — using Windows 11 and potentially a new CPU platform, if all goes to plan.
For now, we've trimmed down the charts to only show ten more or less comparable GPUs. We have a mix depending on which set of charts — medium, ultra, or ray tracing — that you're looking at, but the full set of results will also be available on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy and best graphics cards guides soon.
If you have any suggestions on games you'd like to see included in our updated suite, feel free to let me know in the comments. I want to keep the total under ten, if possible, but I do want a broad selection of genres, as well as both AMD and Nvidia promoted games. And with that out of the way, let's hit the benchmarks.
