Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 6600 XT, 8GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DP, lite retail

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Sapphire does all it can to make the RX 6600 XT tempting. Unfortunately for the company, the retailer price needs to drop to £299 for this to be worthy of a shopping list.

In this review, we tested the Sapphire RX 6600 XT Pulse OC, which is Sapphire's entry-level version of the RX 6600 XT; they also offer the Nitro+, which comes with a more powerful cooler and additional features. Sapphire's rated factory overclock for the Pulse is quite small, only a 4 MHz increase from 2589 MHz to 2593 MHz, or 0.15%. I'm not sure if it's right to even call this an overclock, but lucky for Sapphire, our results suggest that the difference is bigger, around 1–2% depending on the resolution. While this isn't a huge increase, it's better than nothing, and other RX 6600 XT custom-design we've tested aren't doing much better here.

Nvidia has a strong option right now, with the RTX 3060 offering broadly similar performance, and the RTX 3060 Ti pulling mostly ahead of AMD here. However, keep in mind that the Nvidia cards are a much more established chipset, and have more mature drivers too. AMD has shown great strides in closing the gap with post-launch updates in the past. Of course, there’s the other point that while the MSRP’s are close, Nvidia card is mostly still sitting at double their MSRP or broadly out of stock, so it’s hard to say that there’s any real comparison between the Nvidia cards and even most existing AMD cards.