There’s a new GPU kid on the block and it’s the most mainstream RDNA 2 card from AMD to date. And with the AMD Radeon RX 6600 about to hit the scene we take the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle 8G model for a spin. Well… it’s fans did most of that.

A snippet.

It might seem like a little detour but the best way to look at the specs of the new Radeon RX 6600 graphics cards is by comparing the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S. On one side you have a machine built for 4K, a machine that pushes visual fidelity as far as it can go in the console space. The Xbox Series S, well, that’s more of an entry-point targeting 1080p. Fast 60fps 1080p performance. Without having to worry about the absurd number of pixels in a 4K frame it’s RDNA 2 hardware is a significant step down from the Series X -- 20 Compute Units versus the Series X’s 52.

With the Radeon RX 6600 you’re getting a similar situation, 1080p performance that sees the inclusion of 28 Compute Units versus the flagship 6800 XT’s 72. Numbers aren’t everything of course, and with this reduction you’re getting pure efficiency. The Radeon RX 6600 power-draw is rated at 132W, making it good enough for a laptop let alone desktop PC rig. Compared to the Radeon RX 6600 XT it’s a modest reduction in specs, though as we discovered in that review the result in cutting things down was a pretty sizable drop-off in performance when bumping the resolution up to 1440p.

What does this mean for the 1080p performance of the baseline Radeon RX 6600 and how it stacks up against the seemingly like-for-like GeForce RTX 3060? Or even the 6600 XT. For that we’ll have to jump into actual games to see -- which we did. So read on.

Our Full AMD Radeon RX 6600 Review