XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Merc 308 Review

XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Merc 308 Review

Introduction

Having just looked at the ASUS ROG Strix RX 6600 XT and seen how well the newest addition to the RDNA 2 line up performs, so it’s now time to check out the gorgeous XFX RX 6600 XT MERC 308.

The popularity of cards designed for 1080P gaming cannot be overstated. It is easy to believe from Youtubers or people who shout loudly on forums that only the Ultrawide Master Race is the way to game and any other option went out with flares and deely-boppers. Heck manufacturers encourage this too, because the higher your resolution the more hardware you require to power it, and so the more money everyone makes.

If you’ve ever spent any time checking out the Steam Hardware Survey – and you should – then you’ll understand how flawed that viewpoint is. For example, a quad core CPU is used by 38.5% of people, with GPUs which we would consider to be for the enthusiast starting out at 0.8% of people with the RTX 3080. Everything above that is below the RX 580 or RTX 2060 range, with the GTX 1060 and GTX 1050 Ti accounting for 15% of cards.

Resolutions are even more one sided. 67% of people game at 1080P, 8% @ 1440P and 2% @ 4K. More people game at 1366 x 768 than any of the resolutions above 1080P. Yeah, that “4K Master Race” idea doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We’re not suggesting that it isn’t glorious, just that it isn’t popular, and that’s why AMD have aimed their latest RDNA 2 card squarely at the 1080 crowd in the form of the RX 6600 XT.

Technical Specifications

Comparing the older RX 5600 XT and the new RX 6600 XT you can see what great strides the RDNA 2 architecture has made over its first RDNA stablemate. This is something we saw clearly in our testing of the 6000 series of Radeon cards. XFX are remaining tight lipped about the clock speeds although we know that the MERC 308 and XFXs other main RX 6600 XT the QICK 308 both have the same overclocked GPU speed. Indeed it might be interesting to note that a less flashy edition of the MERC 308 is available in the form of the QICK 308, which has the same underpinnings just without the curvy silverness that is part of the XFX MERC aesthetic.

  Radeon RX 6600 XT Radeon RX 5600 XT
Architecture RDNA 2 RDNA
Manufacturing Process 7nm 7nm
Transistor Count 11.1 billion 10.3 billion
Die Size 237 mm2 251 mm2
Compute Units 32 36
Ray Accelerators 32 0
Stream Processors 2048 2304
GPU Clock 2359 MHz 1375 MHz
Boost Clock 2589 MHz 1560 MHz
Single Precision Peak Performance 10.6 TFLOPS 7.19 TFLOPS
Half Precision Peak Performance 21.21 TFLOPS 14.4 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-rate 331.4 GT/s 224.6 GT/s
ROPs 64 64
Peak Pixel Fill-rate 165.7 GP/s 99.8 GPs
Infinity Cache 32 MB 0
Memory 8GB GDDR6 6GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth 256 GB/s 288 GB/s
Memory Interface 128-bit 192-bit
TDP 160W 150W