MSI RX 6600 XT Gaming X Review
Conclusion
No matter how long we’ve been doing this job it never ceases to amaze us at the consistency of modern hardware. Only a few years ago there were enormous differences between certain brands, or just cards produced on a certain day of the week. There were massive steps between cards too, with some being barely good enough to run Minesweeper whilst still proclaiming themselves gaming cards. This unfortunately massively limited the freedom of the consumer to choose the brand they had an affinity with, or even just the product they liked the look of the most.
Nowadays that’s somewhat a thing of the past, and the performance gap between the most affordable take on a particular motherboard or graphics card, and the most expensive one, is slight. All of which leads us to the cards we’ve been reviewing over the last couple of days, the Radeon RX 6600 XT.
Promising to be aimed at 1080P gamers, the RX 6600 XT is definitely a card which ticks that box. It isn’t just that it works well in 1080P games if you include a huge asterisk listing the games it’s not great with. Nope. This is a card which will play anything you can think of. Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the least-optimised, most demanding title currently available and the Gaming X handles it well. Even though you definitely have to turn ray-tracing off, you’re otherwise not having to touch another setting. If it can run that it can run anything you think of. It is worth bearing in mind that whilst the RDNA 2 architecture has ray-tracing on board, the RX 6600 XT is the least ray-tracing on an AMD card, and they’re already peeking their noses over the fence with their first attempt, so it’s best to consider it in the same way you consider HDR on a £200 monitor. Nice to check out once, and then leave it off.
The MSI Gaming X range is equipped with their legendary Twin Frozr cooler, a design which has been revised over the many years we’ve seen it yet never in a way that stopped it being amazingly good at keeping the card cool and the RX 6600 XT version is no different. There is plenty of thermal headroom if you want to push it a little further, but if you don’t then the generally cool nature of the card minimises fan noise, which we can definitely get on board with, having lived through the Delta fan years.
It might not quite have the performance peak of the ASUS Strix, nor the curvy design of the XFX, but the Gaming X is up to the usual high standards we have come to expect from any product containing the MSI Dragon logo. With a retail price of £419.99 it’s not asking you to pay a premium for that either, unlike some. An excellent all-rounder the MSI RX 6600 XT Gaming X wins our OC3D Gamers Choice award.
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