How good is frame rate? This little card does its job very very well in 1080p, absolutely inaudible with the original ventilation curve and since it consumes almost nothing, it does not exceed 55 degrees! It exhibited good performances. In games and 1080p full ultra, even the most demanding AAA titles will hold 60 FPS. Get details in XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card review.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Quiet operation
- Reasonable 1080P gaming performance
- Cooler performs reasonably well
- GPU temperature never goes beyond 65°C even after a long hours gaming session
- Can toggle between OC and Silent mode (?)
- Low power draw
Cons
- No significant overclocking headroom
- Ray-tracing performance is still mediocre
Specs – XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card
- Bus Type: PCI-E 4.0 @ 8x
- Clock Speeds:
- Base clock Up to: 1626 MHz
- Game Clock Up To: 2044 MHz*
- Boost clock Up to: 2491MHz**
- Stream Processors: 1792
- Compute Units: 28
- Memory Bus: 128 bit
- Memory Clock: 14 Gbps
- Memory Size: 8 GB
- Memory Type: GDDR6
- Card Profile: Dual Slot
- Thermal Solution: Dual Fan
- DisplayPort: 1.4 with DSC
- HDMI™: 2.1 VRR and FRL
- Output : Display Port 3
- Output: HDMI 1
- Advanced 7nm GPU
- PCI Express 4.0 Support
- Radeon Image Sharpening
- FidelityFX
- Radeon Anti-Lag
- Microsoft® Windows® 10 Support
- Microsoft® DirectX™ 12 Support
- 7nm Technology
- AMD Virtual Super Resolution (VSR)
- AMD Relive
- AMD FreeSync 2 HDR
- AMD Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC)
- AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
- AMD Radeon Adrenalin Software
- AMD WattMan
- HDMI 2.0b
- Displayport 1.4 w/ DSC
- Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio Support
- Up to 5 displays supported, (may require the use of MST Hubs)
- OpenGL 4.5 Support
- OpenCL Support
Price
The XFX model we tested features 8GB of GDDR6 video memory, which looks dead-on when stacked against Nvidia’s $329-MSRP GeForce RTX 3060. Let’s see how everything else shakes out between these GPUs:
The Navi 23 XT die under the hood of the RX 6600 is, predictably, a ticked-down version of the same GPU we saw in the RX 6600 XT. It succeeds the $279 AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT as the new baseline for discrete-card RDNA buyers (the RX 5600 was OEM-only) and adds a not-small “GPU prices these days” tax of $50 to the MSRP.
Compare XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card
| AMD Radeon RX 6600 | AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT | AMD Radeon RX 6800 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute Units | 28 | 40 | 60 |
| Game Clock | 2044 MHz | 2424 MHz | 1815 MHz |
| Boost Clock | Up to 2491 MHz | Up to 2581 MHz | Up to 2105 MHz |
| Infinity Cache | 32 MB | 96 MB | 128 MB |
| Memory | 8GB GDDR6 | 12GB GDDR6 | 16GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Speed (Effective) | 14 Gbps | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps |
| Memory Interface | 128 bit | 192 bit | 256 bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 224 GB/s | 384 GB/s | 512 GB/s |
| Total Board Power | 132W | 230W | 250W |
XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card review
Design
The XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 comes with a dual-fan cooler and has a dimension of 244mm x 118mm x 38mm, which is compact enough to fit in most of the PC cases you can find in the market. The card’s equipped with two custom fans, both 95mm in diameter.
Ports
As for ports, the back of our XFX card contains the same standard lineup we’ve seen on most GPUs lining (or, rather, widely spaced on) the shelves these days: three DisplayPort 1.4b outputs, one HDMI 2.1 port, and no VirtualLink.
Frame rates
As we scale up the resolution to 1440P, we can see that the RX 6600 is still able to handle some of the titles but is barely able to maintain a consistent 60fps framerate with the highest graphics settings. You can technically game on 1440P with the RX 6600 but that will require some compromise on the graphics settings. Going up to 4K has proven too much for all the cards we have here, which were intended for 1080P gaming only.
Cooling
Like most of the graphics cards nowadays, XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 also comes with a metal backplate to improve the rigidity of the card, as well as for the aesthetics. You’ll find a familiar-looking cutout design at the near end of the card to improve the cooling performance.
Power consumption
Speaking of that 132-watt power requirement, it’s quite a bit lower than Nvidia’s 170-watt baseline for the GeForce RTX 3060—22% lower, to be exact.
Overclocking
Clock speeds show a pretty big difference between FurMark and Metro, with the latter averaging 2485MHz while FurMark only averaged 2080MHz. AMD basically has two sets of behavior with FurMark clocks: The RX 6600 XT and RX 6700 XT run at around 2350MHz, and all the other RX 6000-series GPUs run at around 2080MHz. There’s a lost more variation in clock speeds when running an actual game, with the RX 6600 hitting nearly 2.5GHz — it basically matches the boost clock of 2491MHz almost perfectly.
XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card Performance review
In terms of performance, the RX 6600 was 4% slower than the RTX 3060. 1080p also represents something of a best-case scenario for the RX 6600, and we expect the gap to widen as we increase the quality and resolution since the Infinity Cache benefits go down at higher resolutions. 1080p medium probably sits well below where most people buying the card will play, so let’s also look at how the cards fare at 1080p ultra — and generally speaking, 1080p high will land halfway between the two results.
1440p at medium quality often ends up performing about the same as 1080p at ultra quality, which means the games in our slightly older test suite still run quite well. Better than that, really, as the RX 6600 averaged 106 fps, 15% behind the RX 6600 XT and 9% slower than the RTX 3060. Also, none of the games tested here fell below 60 fps.
The RTX 3060 was only slightly faster than the RX 6600 at 1080p and 1440p, but once we get to 4K the added memory and bandwidth become more important. In our legacy suite, the RTX 3060 was 17% faster, and that same margin of victory holds at 4K ultra as well.The RTX 3060 came out ahead in all of the games in our legacy suite using 4K medium, while Dirt 5 was the only game that favored the 6600 at 4K ultra. But considering both cards fall well short of 60 fps in most games at 4K, it’s a bit of a pyrrhic victory.
XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card customer review
Great card, but warning: not just for gamers.
Very good little card for 1080p gaming if you’re not looking to amp up to 1440p. Runs above a 5700xt if you’re familiar with that little gem. If you want a basic gaming box without breaking the bank, and can get it at stated MSRP, stop waiting and just do it.That said, you may think something this lightweight wouldn’t grab the attention of miners. Nothing could be further from reality. While the 6600XT is no speed demon in ETH MH/s, it is remarkably efficient for power management. An nvidia 3080 non-LHR can pull around 102 MH/s, but burn 240W in the process, thereby netting around 450 kH/W. This little card only churn approximately 32 MH/s, but can do it on only around 45W, thereby netting approximately 700 kH/W. Miners looking to setup inexpensive workhorse rigs can save considerable money on energy by stacking these.
So, if you’re interested in it, and the opportunity comes up to get it as MSRP, do NOT hesitate. Just get it. It isn’t that much money at MSRP, runs very well for 1080p gaming, and will serve you reliably until sanity returns to the marketplace.
By WhozCraig at Best Buy
Alternate of XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Radeon RX 6600 CORE Gaming Graphics Card
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB
Specs
CUDA cores: 3,584Base clock: 1,320MHzBoost clock: 1,777MHzTFLOPs: 12.74Memory: 12GB GDDR6Memory clock: 15GT/sMemory bandwidth: 360GB/s
Pros
+Ready for 60fps at 1440p or greater+Decent gen-on-gen performance improvement+More readily available to purchase in pre-built PCs
Cons
-Not always massively faster than an RTX 2060-RTX 3060 Ti is a better buy at $399
The decision to load the RTX 3060 with 12GB of GDDR6 memory appeared a strange one at first, and in many ways it still is. It’s more memory than the RTX 3080, after all, albeit slower stuff, and it tops out the RTX 3060 Ti too.
And we’re not going to turn our noses up at 12GB of VRAM when 6GB is the likely alternative.
However, the RTX 3060 wields it well, managing to dispatch the RTX 2060 by a large margin in most games, and by enough of a gap in the rest to make it worthwhile.
It’s also nominally cheaper than the RTX 2060 was on launch day, though it’s not so easy to find it as a discrete number nowadays. That said, this card often crops up within pre-built gaming PCs, and for a decent price all-inclusive too.
With a decent generation-on-generation improvement and plenty of speed at 1080p and 1440p, the RTX 3060 12GB is a graphics card easily argued for.
Editor’s recommendations
- PowerColor Red Dragon AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT review – is it overclocked?
- XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster QICK 319 black gaming graphics card review
- ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 Trinity OC 24GB GDDR6X review
- MSI gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB GDDR6X 320-bit review – what is the frame rate?
- Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Vision OC 8G graphics card review – how well is overclock?
