Official renders of the Gigabyte RX 6600 Eagle Edition
Last month, the cheapest Radeon graphics card with the RDNA 2 architecture, the RX 6600 XT was released with the Navi 23 GPU. But an even cheaper model could be joining it very soon: the vanilla Radeon RX 6600. Official images of the Eagle Edition graphics card have surfaced on the web, which means that presumably, the release date is getting closer. The leak also confirmed that the cards will still have 8 GB of memory.
The images in question aren’t real photos, just 3D renders used for promotion. They capture the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle Edition. These materials serve as product illustration for retailers and distributors, amongst other uses.
The source of the leak was the VideoCardz website, possibly having obtained them from an insider in the supply chain. This could mean that the card is already getting ready for launch. Older leaks have indicated that the launch could happen before the end of this month and this new bit supports this idea, although nothing can be said for sure.
From the outside, this card looks almost identical to the RX 6600 XT Eagle Edition, but it seems that Gigabyte will use a distinct PCB. The 8-pin connector seems to be moved slightly towards the center of the card, which means the PCB has to be shorter, so there’s definitely been a change to it. It’s possible that the RX 6600 will have a cheaper and a less powerful power delivery (VRM) in this version due to the TDP being lower than the XT’s 160W. We would actually welcome this, as there is a severe lack of a graphic card with lower TDP (for example 120W) in the current GPU generation with ray tracing support.
However, what definitely won’t get cut down on this model is the memory capacity. Some speculation (and some confusing leaks) arose that the new cheaper model could have its memory reduced, which would definitely pose a problem, especially if it would be down all the way to 4 GB. Fortunately, that won’t happen. According to the retail box image, the card will have 8GB of GDDR6 memory. What we don’t know yet is whether it will be clocked at the same 16,0 GHz frequency as on the XT model, or if AMD will drop it to just 14,0 GHz.
The Navi 23 GPU in the RX 6600 should have 1792 shaders (28 out of 32 CUs) and 28 Ray Accelerators active, the memory bus should stay at 128 bits though and the 32 MB of Infinity Cache will also remain. Further specifications haven’t leaked yet, so things like frequencies and TDP remain a mystery.
The price will hopefully be lower that the 379 USD that AMD charges for an RX 6600 XT. But looking at AMD’s previous takes (RX 6700 XT officially for 479 USD), we can’t really expect this model to be super cheap. Getting below the 300 USD line is likely a long shot, we are expecting an MSRP somewhere around 329 USD (which is the price of the GeForce RTX 3060, which will probably be faster).
Whether the earlier “gossip” about a September release becomes a reality, remains to be seen. VideoCardz now estimates that the card could make it to market sometime in early October. It’s quite possible though that a paper launch will take place this month while a physical release to store shelves will only happen a bit later, in October. Let’s hope there will be no delays due to the crypto mining situation…
Zdroj: VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš, original text by Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
