Sapphire Radeon RX 6600 XT Pulse 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 Sapphire Radeon RX 6600 XT Pulse here.

The price of these new cards 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

Nvidia has a strong option right now, with the RTX 3060 offering broadly similar performance, and the RTX 3060 Ti pulling mostly ahead of AMD here. However, keep in mind that the Nvidia cards are a much more established chipset, and have more mature drivers too. AMD has shown great strides in closing the gap with post-launch updates in the past. Of course, there’s the other point that while the MSRP’s are close, Nvidia card is mostly still sitting at double their MSRP or broadly out of stock, so it’s hard to say that there’s any real comparison between the Nvidia cards and even most existing AMD cards.

1080p

I was honestly expecting a little more variation between each of the 6600 XT graphics cards we’ve tested, but they’re actually all broadly similar in terms of performance. The Sapphire card is the least extreme of the bunch, but you would be hard pushed to figure that out by playing a game on them side by side. I want to think it’ll be more affordable as a result, but as above, that’s tricky to guess in today’s market. However, if you’re gaming on a 1920 x 1080 monitor, not only will you enjoy at least 60 FPS gaming, but you’ll be able to enjoy higher refresh rate displays too.

Higher Resolutions

We use high settings in all our testing, that way we can see if you should turn your settings down further or if you have headroom to increase your quality settings on a per-game basis. I’m happy to report that while this card is targeted towards 1080p gamers, it smashed it at 1440p too, giving great performance in a huge range of titles. Much to my surprise, even the 4K performance was alright, with all games being playable and a few of them even pushing past 60 FPS. Not perfect, but it’s serviceable for Steam streaming a game from your PC to your 4KTV.

Power

All of the 6600 XT cards used broadly the same amount of power, and considering the performance was similar to the RTX 3060, AMD’s cards were using around 40 watts less overall, which is impressive. This card did run around 5c warmer than the MSI card and a little louder, but overall, it was well within the green, and performance was stable throughout testing.

Should I Buy One?

For those looking for a graphics card right now, any of the 6600 XTs are competitive. Sapphire has a nice looking card here, and its fairly compact and simple design will certainly appeal to many. It’s also likely to be a little less expensive than some of the rival offerings that have bigger coolers and overclocks, but as we saw, that didn’t make much difference in gaming performance.