Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Gigabyte's packaging for the Eagle doesn't really convey the fact that you're getting a barebones reference card. The card itself looks like the Eagle logo should light up in blue, but it doesn't. It's basically the same PCB design as the higher spec Gigabyte cards, but without any RGB or factory overclock. The three fans measure about 78mm in diameter (Gigabyte says 80mm, but our measuring tape told a different story), and unlike higher end fans, there's no integrated rim. There's certainly room for a slightly larger fan, and the impact of using smaller fans can be seen in both the cooling and noise levels we'll get to later.
The Eagle measures 289 x 112 x 38mm and tips the scales at 674g (those are both our measurements), which is longer but shorter and slightly thinner than the Sapphire Pulse. The ASRock Phantom by comparison weighs 898g and measures 306 x 131 x 47mm, easily the largest of the three RX 6600 XT cards. If you have a sufficiently-long mini-ITX case, the Gigabyte Eagle might be a good fit, but again, check the cooling and noise results later in the review as you'll see it doesn't stack up that well against the other cards.
About the only real differentiating factor between the Eagle and the other cards is that it includes two HDMI 2.1 ports. While nearly all gaming monitors still tend to prefer DisplayPort 1.4 — it can do 4K at 144 Hz with DSC, and FreeSync / adaptive sync is more commonly supported over DP — HDMI 2.1 technically offers superior specs. You can read more about DisplayPort vs. HDMI, but either one should be sufficient for typical gaming use, particularly on a 1080p display, AMD's target for the RX 6600 XT. If you want to use the card with a TV, dual HDMI 2.1 ports might be more useful, but then you'd really need to run a multi-monitor setup with TVs to need both ports, as finding any gaming monitors with HDMI 2.1 support remains difficult.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
MORE: All Graphics Content
30-year-old Pentium FDIV bug tracked down in the silicon — Ken Shirriff takes the microscope to Intel's first-ever recall
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.2 claims to improve Arrow Lake performance by up to 33%, theoretically matching the Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Empyrean Technology gives control to CEC after U.S. blacklisting — China’s top developer of chip design systems hands reins to state-owned firm
