XFX RX 6600 SWFT 210 Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The AMD 6600 series of cards, which will of course include today’s XFX RX 6600 SWFT 210, are launching at $329 USD or £299.99 MSRP in the US and UK, respectively. Of course, there’s little to no chance of actually seeing them at MSRP due to growing demand. For example, the faster 6600 XT launched around $379 MSRP, which should translate to around £325 in the UK once you work out tax differences. However, that’s currently selling at £470, around £150 above its MSRP after launch. So it’s safe to guess that the new card will start at roughly £300 MSPR and beyond. However, it must remain cheaper than the 6600 XT; otherwise, what’s the point. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it sell a little over £400 in some places. Is that great value for money? At this point, it’s really down to what you have in your wallet and how urgently you need a card, but this may still be your most affordable solution for some time.

Overview

Pricing aside, as I’ve really dwindled on that for as long as is interesting, this is actually a pretty decent card. It’s clear that it can trade blows with the Nvidia RTX 3060 surprisingly well. At 1080p resolutions, frame rates were exceptionally good with high settings, indicating you could push to higher detail settings, or enjoy higher refresh rate displays, even on the latest games. AMD outpaced Nvidia, if only by a small margin, in titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Dirt 5. Of course, even when Nvidia had the lead, it was a pretty close call.

It runs a tiny bit warmer and louder than some GPUs, but not so much that it would be really a bother. That was expected though, this is a budget-focused design as we saw earlier, and right now, I’ll take the cost savings as it’s not like the card was throttling due to heat during our testing. It is amusing that it uses quite a bit less power than the RTX 3060 despite the similar performance.

Resolutions

Nvidia has the advantage here. At 1440p, the higher VRAM count on the Nvidia cards just gave them an edge over the latest AMD card. However, it’s not a drastic difference, and this is still a viable card for 1440p gaming, so long as you have reasonable expectations on what sort of settings you should aim for. eSports games, great, maxed out ray-traced gaming? Not so much.

Ray Tracing

The card is a bit naff for ray tracing, but it’s the bottom rung of the AMD performance ladder, so that’s not a surprise. Still, you can get around 38 FPS in Dirt 5 with it turned on, and 18 FPS in Metro, but that’s actually not that far off the RTX 3060. Of course, their new upscaling technologies fill in the gap here, much like DLSS would for Nvidia. It’s really a technology that gets better with every update too. Either way, the resolution scaling tech is more advantageous to these lower-end cards than ray tracing right now.

Should I Buy One?

The card trades blows with the RTX 3060 well enough, coming just ahead or behind in pretty much every benchmark. For 1080p gaming, it’s got plenty of power to keep those graphics settings turned up. Of course, It shares a lot of its hardware with the faster 6600 XT, such as the 32MB of Infinity Cache, 8GB of GDDR6, PCIe 4.0 8x, and 64 ROPs. However, the lower TDP and slimmed down cooler make it a more affordable prospect, and in today’s inflated market, affordable and in stock is what’s going to win the race. Plus, with the RTX 3060 currently sitting with a £200 premium over this card, I think I’ll have to stick with the red team for this round.