AMD Radeon RDNA2 Navi (RX 6500, 6600, 6700, 6800, 6900 XT)

Blowers have an abhorrent rep as far as DIY market goes thus...

 

Asrock's got your back:

https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon RX 6600 XT Challenger ITX 8GB/

They were fine as long as they were well made and the cards consumed less than 250W average.



It's probably AMD who poisoned the well with their terrible 290X reference coolers, and then the Vega cards although having decent blowers needed very high RPM to push up their clocks in order to stay competitive.

But remembering the 290X, I still think it's impressive how they could screw up the launch of a great performing new GPU by using a cheap and loud cooler.

 

Still louder-than-average and in general terribad rep.
AMD pompously offed blowers for 6k series lel.

 

So something is improved for Navi23 over the older Navi chips, and looks like some of these samples will go beyond the magical 3GHz mark,

https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/dominic-moass/sapphire-rx-6600-xt-pulse-review/12/

 

OTOH, it's normal for larger chips made on the same process to be able to clock lower, especially given the fact that in all AMD and Nvidia cards the chips are artificially power-limited in the BIOS, despite the gargantuan coolers and overengineered VRMs.

 

Personally I'm glad they got rid of the blower design as I hated the way they sounded. The theory was good to get the air out of the system, but it made cleaning them nearly impossible without ruining the TIM on the memory and it was a pain in the arse to find that stuff back then.

Fans just blowing on it I like. You can clean around them or just usually remove a shroud and get them clean. Then it's just a matter of making sure the case has adequate air flow.

I've never played with SMF/SFF/mITX stuff as I like big cases with lots of room and I tend to modify them with tinsnips and hacksaws a bit so I can't really argue your point. I'm assuming little SFF boxes don't really have a lot of cooling air flow, but a strategically placed 120mm fan should make up the difference a blower would make if it's possible to fit one in.

(I literally have no idea, I have no applications for SFF. My wife's TV computer is a half tower that's a total frankenstein of left over bits, but it hides well behind her big screen tv. )

TL/DR: Sorry you're disappointed, but blowers suck on GPUs. It just took them a while to figure it out.

 

I get what you're saying ToT and I'd rather AMD get the extra cash than scalpers, but it's still a kick in the nuts that the card is almost double what I'd expect a card like that to go for. This should be a $200-250us card at this performance point on launch in any normal hardware sales environment, $380 is WAAAY too much.

I do get it, I really do...but I can't like it. I just can't.

 

Super efficient eth miner

 

the energy efficiency of this thing is incredible. Just imagine it on a laptop.

At 50W power consumption you dont get that far from top performance.



At 70W power consumption you are quite close...

 

6600M for laptops already launched a month or so ago, so it's just a matter of time and AMD commitment to deliver batches of GPUs to see them there. Looking forward to it.

 

mobile stuff is where there are decent prices nowadays.

The main issue with this gpu -PCIx3 vs PCIx4 aside- is that it marks the disappearance of the medium tier in the GPU world. The price is that of a high tier GPU, and the main selling point of GPUs for gaming is usually the one where the RX 6600 should be and it's not....

 

As far as I can tell, the indirect results of the pandemic (crypto craze and global semiconductor shortage) are what killed the medium tier, and not the RX 6600XT.

If the 6700XT could realistically be found for $480, the 3060 for $330 or the 3060 Ti for $400, then the 6600XT would never launch for $380.

 

It wouldn’t matter if launch MSRP was lower. The inflated street price would be the same either way. AMD is just doing the smart thing and keeping more of the pie for itself.

 

I think it's subtler than that. There are no "reference" design 6600XTs, they are all third-party designs. So the AIBs are in competition with each other to cover the range from "basic" to "nuclear" cards.

Looking here:

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Specs | TechPowerUp GPU Database

we can see there are about 20 models by GALAX alone. WTF!

So each AIB is choosing price points. There can be no "AMD MSRP" for cards when there's no reference design. At best you can get MSRP for specific cards by AIBs. And the AIBs will change the MSRP on a weekly basis...

 

Not sure what you mean. Didn’t AMD announce the target price for the 6600xt at $379? They don’t need to make a reference design in order to declare MSRP.

 

AMD announced a price for a product that doesn't exist.

 

MSRP is always set in discussions with AIBs which are committing to actually hitting it with some of their products. So it is a price for products which must exist, unless someone is lying.

 

A lot of RX 6600 XT's actually did sell for $380 on release day.

 

And some of those were deliberate, time-/quantity-limited arrangements explicitly set for the launch.

Each AIB is not obliged to hit MSRP with any custom product.

As time goes by, custom products fall in price, too, often below launch MSRP. Where's the MSRP then?

 

They actually are.