XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT MERC 308 Review

A Closer Look

Without a doubt, this is a very attractive graphics card. XFX hasn’t gone for bright colours and loads of RGB here. Actually, there isn’t any RGB at all! It’s just matte black and a hint of silver trim in a few places, giving it a much more mature and stylish look overall. It should blend in with virtually any system build style easily enough. It’s similar to the XFX 319 RX 3800 XT, but they’ve toned down the silver and branding even more on the new one.

The fans are their new and improved 13-blade design, which is fewer than before, but XFX is certain it has more airflow and less noise, which is always what we want to hear! Unlike a lot of newer GPUs, there’s no rim on the edge of the blades. Instead, there’s a ring on the shroud, which will help push the air down rather than out the side of the fan.

The card is quite thick, coming in at 2.5 slots, and it’s pretty long too. Actually, it’s the biggest 6600 XT we’ve seen to date, with MSI and Sapphire opting for a shorter dual fan design and 2-slot cards, so make sure your system has room for this one! Of course, all that extra space is being used up by that massive heatsink. The increased surface area will allow this card to passively cool itself for longer while also improving cooling performance in heavy GPU load scenarios.

There’s excellent ventilation on both sides too, of course, having that 2.5 slots design means there’s more surface area in general anyway.

That card runs from a single 8-pin. However, XFX recommends a 750W PSU based system for their card, while the AMD reference was just 500W. I think they’re overly cautious here, but either way, I am expecting this to be a more power-hungry version of the 6600 XT.

The backplate is massive and with a matte black design that gives it a much stealthier look overall. There are lots of ventilation holes towards the rear and a large cut-out, allowing the fans to push air through the heatsink and out the back of the card, which should vastly improve the cooling performance.

The end of the card is pretty clean, with a closed up design and a nicely finished edge to the various aluminium and plastic sections.

There are three DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC, and one HDMI 2.1 with VRR and FRL here, with a nice bit of ventilation, cut into the XFX logo, which looks really slick.