MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X Review

How Much Does It Cost?

What do you think I am, psychic? I have no idea, beyond it’ll likely be above the $350-370 MSRP. Even then, stock issues, scalping and other issues are likely to persist, albeit to a lesser degree than we’ve previously seen. Things are improving, but me telling you a price right now will likely be inaccurate pretty swiftly.

You can check Amazon UK for up to date stock and prices of the MSI Radeon RX 6600 XT Gaming X here.

The price of this card is interesting, as the market is hurting pretty bad right now. Demand is through the roof, but production costs are higher than ever. Many parts of the world are still stuck in various levels of pandemic, and global manufacturing costs are up, as are international shipping costs (by quite a drastic amount). That means, compared to two years ago, that these more affordable cards are sitting at the price we would have hoped to see more powerful 1440p focused models by now. However, it is what it is, and these are the new entry levels models right now for those eager to get their first gaming PC off the ground or even upgrade some much older systems.

Overview

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.

1080p

While the RTX 3060 Ti is the fastest of the bunch, the 6600 XT trades blows with our MSI RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio, coming ahead or behind each other depending on which game was running. AMD typically showed more advantage in Vulcan and DX12 titles. However, I was surprised that both were fairly competitive with ray tracing, which is to say both were crap, but hey, these are budget cards after all. Thankfully, when it comes to raw gaming performance, 60 FPS will not be an issue, as most games were over 100 FPS, some over 200 FPS.

Higher Resolutions

Using high settings, even 1440p and 4K gaming were not actually out of reach. Doom Eternal, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint and Wolfenstein Youngblood hit above 60 FPS at 4K, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Either way, for a modest gaming GPU, it has more legs than you would think. If you’re running the latest demanding games, 1080p is easy. If you like games from a few years ago, higher resolutions are on the cards. Not that most affordable PC builds will have a 4K monitor, but many people do have a 4KTV they could leverage too.

Power

The temperatures were decent, actually just sitting 1c above their RTX 3060 model, and actually, at just 60c at old, the card is pretty cool overall. You could max it out on a hot summer’s day, and I still don’t think it’ll throttle any time soon. The noise levels are decent too, just 40.1 dBa, showing the real benefit of those larger TORX 4.0 fans! The power consumption is lower than the RTX 3060 too, which is impressive given the comparative performance. While the RTX 3060 Ti was using more head, power and noise, it was outperforming AMD as a result.

Should I Buy One?

For those looking for a graphics card right now, this will not set the world on fire with record-breaking performance. However, it was never designed to do that anyway. It’s a competent card, and I think that’s a pretty fair thing to say. It smashes things at 1080p, not that doing such a thing is hard these days. However, I was surprised it could still pack a punch at 1440p in most games too, so long as you stick with high settings, not ultra. The factory overclock, and excellent quality cooler from MSI may come at a small premium over the competition, but given the fuss-free performance, low temperatures and low noise, it’s clearly a sound investment. Overall, if you can find stock that hasn’t been scalped, it’ll tie you over for a couple of years easily enough.