The RX 6500 XT: A GPU for Desperate Times
Our XFX Quicksilver 10 cards, dual fan layout seems to be a little bit overbuilt for this GPU, with the hotspot never reading beyond 75 degrees except for a brief spike while rendering the initial loading screen. The RX 6600 happens to share the same cooler and it reaches just past 80 degrees throughout the run.
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody were to make a single slot variation of this card, particularly seeing how there's only two display outputs to work around. Power consumption is where things get very interesting. This is almost a linear drop for the 28 compute unitson the RX 6600. Power draw briefly breaks the 100 watt mark while rendering the loading screen and settles into that average around 80 Watts during the run proper.
Now this is the default power target for this card, but the fact that it remains at max core clocksnear 2.9 gigahertz is impressive. That said, if AMD had shaved off just 5 Watts more power consumption, they could have been the only modern GPU with no PC unexpressed power requirements.
At the end of the day, the RX 6500 XT is a GPU for the desperate, plain and simple. It trumps blows well enough to work out for roughly equal performance to the GTX1660 or 1070 in gaming, which is great. But it falls behind those older cards, anywhere four gigabytes of video memory is too little. The unfortunate reality is this is already a problem for AMD's own guidance. Heck, it was a problem for the RX 580. Nobody wanted the four gig version for $200 back in 2017. And it's only going to get worse from here.
For an extra hundred bucks or so, the RX 6600 represents shockingly close to double the performance. If of course you could buy one of them at SRP. It feels kind of wrong to call that card or even its NVIDIA equivalent a good value but this is the world we inhabit today.
The RX 6500 XT really could have been something special if AMD hadn't brutalized it to meet that $199 price point. At least these are using new manufacturing capacity, unlike some of NVIDIA's other upcoming GPU's. But the RTX 3050 is going to come in at a $50 premium with eight gigs of faster video memory, a full media engine and more than two display outputs, which makes it pretty compelling on that basis alone.
High I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth not because AMD cut the card down but because quite frankly, I would recommend waiting until the RTX 3050 launch to make your decision on whether to buy this thing. Because of the current market situation, the reality is that you don't have that long. You might not even be able to find one as of right now, thanks to miners, scalpers and desperate gamers alike.
I do wonder what AMD's margins on this thing are. Because it's a surething, they'll sell out. Just like I sell them for sponsors like Hello Fresh.
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They source fresh pre-portioned ingredients in recycled content packaging. So you can waste less and eat more sustainably. And if you're looking to save time cooking, they even have 20 minute meals and low prep options. Keeping on your resolutions is hard enough. So let Hello Fresh deliver help through delicious meals right to your door.
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Thanks for watching guys. Go check out our recent overview of AMD's other CES announcements for more on what to expect from team red in 2022. There's a lot of cool stuff coming.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- A new GPU is launching.Will you be lucky enough toget one before they're gone?What do you mean?What are the specs?It's a new GPU.You have to buy it, right?You'll have to forgive mefor being a little jaded at this point.It's tough to truly getexcited about these launchesand this one's especially tough for mebecause AMB's pulling out all the stopsto cost down the new RX 6500 XT.With 16 RDNA 2 compute units,this thing isn't muchmore powerful on paperthan AMD's new Ryzen 6000 mobile APUs.Is there anything to be excited about hereor does AMD just think you'llbuy anything at this point?(chuckling)I think you'll buy thissegue to our sponsor, though.Privacy.com lets you shop onlinewith virtual credit cardsthat offer way more security and controlthan conventional cards.Click the link in descriptionto get $5 to spend on your first purchasewhen you sign up below.(bright upbeat music)How do you make a GPU that'saffordable in these dark times?According to AMD,first, you slash thenumber of compute units,video memory, and memory interfacecompared to even a five-year-old GPU.Then, you cut from 16 PCIexpress gen three lanesto four gen four lanes forhalf the total bandwidth.Finally, and this step is important,you remove the mediaengines and coder blocksand all but two of the display outputs.One HDMI 2.1 port andone display port 1.4.Yes, this GPU has a lower transistor countthan the RX 570,a card that kinda sucked on its own.Although that's not to saythat this has no tricks up its sleeve.The core clocks are cranked up past 11with peak boosts getting shockingly closeto three gigahertz.What's more,the more efficient RDNA 2 architectureon TSMC's N6 process,and this is the first GPUusing it to make it to market,makes for a graphics cardthat's less power hungrythan that old card, albeitjust by about 40 Watts or so.From the spec sheet alone,the RX 6500 XT looks more likean energy efficient RX 580,which isn't a great signfor what is supposed tobe a $200 GPU in 2022.Granted with inflation,the RX 570 is actually closer in price,but this isn't a huge performanceper dollar improvementin the span of five years.At least on paper,we've gathered an arrayof old and new GPUs,including the RX 580,in order to put the AMD'sperformance claims to test.It's worth mentioningthat AMD's target audienceis folks with GPUsseveral generations old.So our test rig is actually giving itthe best possible scenarioto stretch its legs.Your mileage will surely varyand it looks like itvaries for the RX 6500 XT'sgaming performance too.F1 2021 starts off withsome pretty low performancefor AMD's new GPU,reaching less than 75% of the performanceof the RX 580 from 2017.I reran this bench a bunchbecause it doesn't make any sense,but that's what I got.Things get even worse whenwe enable ray tracing.We're just 16 ray acceleratorsisn't nearly enough tokeep frame rates playableat a title like this.Remember the RX 6600 has lessthan twice the compute units,but that card performsnearly three times faster.It's possible that videomemory is a bottleneck here.Which really shows its face in Far Cry 6where the game itself,even straight up saysthat every preset, but 1080p lowis more than the GPU'sframe buffer can handle.Surprisingly the performanceat 1080p high doesn't tank.It's just enough to squeeze byand only the RX 6600 outperforms there.When we turn on ray tracing though.(chuckles)Yup.There's your V-RAM bottleneck right there,told you it was marginal.To be clear guys, thatyou're not going to want torun anything ray tracewith this class of GPUwithout running some kindof upscaling algorithmlike AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution.And even then it's probably a bad idea.These RT tests are all aboutthe relative performanceversus the RX 6600rather than some kind ofendorsement or lack thereof.Forza Horizon 4 brings some more good newsfor the RX 6500 XT though.The medium preset easily fits into memory.So we see performanceunequaled by any other GPU,save its bigger brother.This carries over to Hitman 3 too,although there's a pig asteriskthat needs to be thrown over this one.These numbers are for thesecond run of the benchmark.The game hitches bad onthe first run every timeand that's problem.I think this is a resultof memory bandwidthbeing just so low.Because once the assets arein memory, everything's fine.Streaming in texturesand assets really hammersthe 64 bit memory bus.Now AMD claims the effectivememory bandwidth is up to231 gigabytes per second.But the problem with this number is thatit's using the infinity cache,which is ridiculously fast by comparison.The real bandwidth is144 gigabytes per second,and that is rough. It's below the RX 580.That's why it's chugging.It's filling the smallinfinity cash and thendumping it out to RAM as fast as it can.And it's just not fast enough.All of these settings were fullywithin AMD's guidance by the way.Finally, CS:GO was a titlethat's very bandwidth hungry,as we discovered in our recentGPU splitting exploration.And it's confirmed big time here.16 megs of infinity cash isn't enoughand it falls behind even the RX 580in terms of minimum frame rates.Which has made even worse by the 6500 XT'shigher average FPS.That higher variation willfeel like stutters in gameand can lead to miss shots or worse.It's not a great experience.Productivity isn't thisclass of GPS forte,but AMD had a pretty goodrun at the top of the chartsback in the day.Blender is not good.The new HIP API support doesits job with the RX 6600,but the 6500 XT only beats the RX 580.Because that card is no longer supported.While it beats out theGTX 1660 in Photoshop,it loses to everythingelse and every other test.With substantially lessperformance in DaVinci Resolve,likely thanks to its fourgigabyte frame buffer.Indigo benchmark shows itbeating out its ancestor,pretty soundly, but everyother card does too.So it's not a great showing overall.Mind you, all of thesecards cost a fortuneon the street by comparison.But the GTX 1660 launched at $219.So it's really a loss for AMD.The 6500 XT is not somethingsomeone with a card in this classwould want to upgrade to for productivity.Instead you shouldupgrade to a water bottlefrom lttstore.com.Unlike GPU V RAM, we don'tcharge for extra capacity.If you're looking foran upgrade for an old PCwith this class of GPU as AMD intents,chances are you only havefour or six cores at bestand you're probably runningPCI express gen three.This card has four gen four lanes,which is finding the gen four board,but in a gen three boardthat's half the bandwidth,which might not be so fine.That's a bottleneck.Although whether there'll be a problemdepends on how weak your CPU is.The bigger problem forpotential upgraders is thatthere's no hardwarevideo encoding support.So streaming has to be doneentirely on the CPU coresor integrated graphics, if you got them.This might not be sucha big deal with simplere-sports titles that don'ttake full advantage ofmore than a couple of cores.But if you're a buddingstreamer looking to streamall of your gameplay,you'll probably want to look elsewhereor else play older or very simple titles.Now as with any of these lower end GPU'swithout founder's edition style cards,thermals are going tovary from design to designand there's no referencecooler to compare against,so take this one with some salt.Our XFX Quicksilver 10cards, dual fan layoutseems to be a little bitoverbuilt for this GPU,with the hotspot neverreading beyond 75 degreesexcept for a brief spike while renderingthe initial loading screen.The RX 6600 happens to sharethe same cooler and it reachesjust past 80 degrees throughout the run.I wouldn't be surprisedif somebody were to makea single slot variation of this card,particularly seeing how there's onlytwo display uplifts to work around.Power consumption is wherethings get very interesting.This it's almost a lineardrop for the 28 compute unitson the RX 6600.Power draw only brieflybreaks the a 100 watt markwhile rendering the loading screenand settles into thataverage around 80 Wattsduring the run proper.Now this is the defaultpower target for this card,but the fact that itremains at max core clocksnear 2.9 gigahertz is impressive.That said, if AMD had shaved off just5 Watts more power consumption,they could have been the only modern GPUwith no PC unexpressed power requirements.At the end of the day, the RX 6500 XTis a GPU for the desperate,plain and simple.It trace blows well enough to work out toroughly equal the GTX1660 or 1070 in gaming,which is great.But it falls behind those older cards,anywhere four gigabytes ofvideo memory is too little.And the unfortunate reality is,this is already a problemfor AMD's own guidance.Heck it was a problem for the RX 580.Nobody wanted the four gigversion for $200 back in 2017.And it's only going toget worse from here.For an extra a hundred bucks or sothe RX 6600 represents shockingly closeto double the performance.If of course you couldbuy one of them at SRP.It feels kind of wrong to call that cardor even it's NVIDIAequivalent a good valuebut this is the world we inhabit today.The RX 6500 XT really couldhave been something special.If AMD hadn't brutalized itto meet that $199 price point.At least these are usingnew manufacturing capacity,unlike some of NVIDIA'sother upcoming GPU's.But the RTX 3050 is goingto come in at a $50 premiumwith eight gigs of faster video memory,a full media engine and morethan two display outputs,which makes it prettycompelling on that basis alone.high imo.Get subscribed by the way,because we're going to haveher full review of that cardready for its launch too.I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth.Not because AMD cut the card down,but because quite frankly,I would recommend waitinguntil the RTX 3050 launchesto make your decision onwhether to buy this thing.But because of thecurrent market situation,the reality is that youdon't have that long.You might not even be ableto find one as of right now,thanks to minors, scalpersand desperate gamers alike.I do wonder what AMD'smargins on this thing are.Because it's a surething, they'll sell out.Just like I sell it forsponsors like Hello Fresh.- Thanks to Hello Freshfor sponsoring this video.Time for a healthy new year's resolution,Hello Fresh is here to helpyou hit your healthy goals.With Hello Fresh,you get fresh pre proportioned ingredientsand seasonal recipesdelivered right to your door.They create deliciousstep-by-step recipes every week,including calorie smart, carbs smartand family-friendly options.They source freshpre-portioned ingredientsin recycled content packaging.So you can waste lessand eat more sustainably.And if you're lookingto save time cooking,they even have 20 minutemeals and low prep options.Keeping on yourresolutions is hard enough.So let hello fresh deliverhelp through delicious mealsright to your door.Go to HelloFresh.com anduse code LINUSTECHTIPS16for up to 16 free mealsand three surprise gifts.That's HelloFresh.compromo code LINUSTECHTIPS16.- Thank for watching guys.Go check out our recent overview of AMD'sother CES announcementsfor more on what to expectfrom team red in 2022.There's a lot of cool stuff coming.\n"
