PowerColor Radeon RX 6500 XT

Budget Navi Grafikkarte! Nach und nach erweitert AMD sein Navi-Line-up und bedient auch die Kunden mit dem kleineren Geldbeutel, wenn es um aktuelle RDNA2-Grafikkarten geht. Mit der AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT gibt es eine sparsame 1080p-Gaming-Grafikkarte. Mit deutlichen Einschränkungen bei den technischen Daten hat AMD aber den Rotstift deutlich angesetzt. Wir schauen uns genauer an, was dennoch an Leistung erwartet werden kann.

AMD and Nvidia do have cards focused on high refresh gaming at 1080p as well and this isn’t the target for the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB tested here as well. What we saw for performance was a card capable of playing anything you throw at it at 1080p with a few of those games maybe needing the detail dropped down just slightly to get that smooth 60+ frame rate. What was surprising however is how the additional VRAM changed performance even when comparing performance with the overclocked 6500 XT 4GB at 1080p. It was a bigger difference than expected but only in some games and mostly at the highest detail settings. The competing RTX 3050 6GB came in behind the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB at 1080p. At the highest resolutions the 3050 did jump ahead, but those were resolutions and frame rates you wouldn’t be playing on either card. In the end, the 6500 XT 8GB was notably better for raster performance but like we saw in the higher-end cards the 3050 6GB was still better when new technology like ray tracing was introduced in tests like 3Dmark Speed Way and Port Royal. As for the PowerColor RX 6500 XT Fighter 8GB itself, I was surprised with the overall card design. It is of course compact and barebones. But PowerColor went fully barebones when it came to styling with the blacked out all flat fan shroud design. On the other end of the spectrum though the card still has a metal backplate which a lot of budget cards don’t get at all or sometimes get a plastic backplate that transmits no heat. They even went as far as to paint the PCI bracket black to match proving that we should be seeing that even more on higher-end cards if cheaper cards can get the feature. My only complaints would be the need for at least one more display connection. You get one HDMI and one DisplayPort which covers what you should need, but it is nice to get two matching connection types and open up the possibility of hooking up three displays for those who might need it. I would also love to see in future cards focused on this performance/resolution to get an option that doesn’t have a PCIe power connection at all. The RTX 3050 6GB doesn’t have one due to it being more power efficient and it opens it up to being able to use it as an upgrade for a cheap prebuilt without having to worry about having the power connections needed to power the GPU.

PowerColor can't impress here with the Radeon RX 6500 XT Fighter, as AMD under-cooked the Navi 24 GPU as it was... gimped it with 4GB of GDDR6... gimped it in multiple ways. The final product is a big, fat, meh.