One thing I wasn’t expecting about this year’s Memorial Day PC gaming deals, was that there would actually be some genuine graphics card deals going off. Given that pricing and stock have been in such a nightmarish state for the past year and a bit, I was expecting another sales event to pass without even a sniff of a discounted GPU.
But here we are with a mainstream AMD Radeon graphics card actually selling for below MSRP. This reference-clocked XFX RX 6600 started out life at AMD’s standard $329 sticker price, was then listed at $320, and now has dropped below the $300 mark.
At launch, we weren’t hugely impressed with the Radeon RX 6600. It was priced up against the Nvidia RTX 3060, came with less RAM and often performed slightly slower than the green team’s mid-range card. Times have changed, however, and you can’t find an equivalent GeForce GPU around this price, with the RTX 3060 generally commanding a $100 premium even as stock levels return to normal.
XFX Speedster Radeon RX 6600 | 8GB GDDR6 | 1,792 cores | 2,491MHz Boost | $319.99 $299.99 at Best Buy (save $20)
GPUs under their reference price have been few and far between over the past couple years, and the fact that AMD’s made huge strides in supply is really telling at retail now. For over $100 less than any RTX 3060 out there, this RX 6600 will still perform at the same level.
That makes this XFX RX 6600 a great GPU deal right now, because there’s nothing in its gaming performance weight class that comes close to the price of this card. And the XFX Speedster version, though it is a pretty restrained dual-fan design, doesn’t need the bells and whistly things of fancier, higher-end GPUs.
The RX 6600 GPU runs cool, and under the large heatsink and twin fans it will likely match the sub-65°C mark the Powercolor version we tested stayed at during gaming. That’s going to make it a quiet card, and one that isn’t going to melt a hole in the side of your rig.
Sure, you can find faster cards if you’re willing to pay more—you can grab the XFX RX 6700 XT for $499.99 right now, for example—but if you’re after a good quality mid-range GPU for some summer game time, this is a great-value option.