Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT EAGLE 8GB Graphics Card

Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT EAGLE 8GB Graphics Card

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT GAMING OC PRO is Integrated with an 8GB GDDR6 128-bit memory interface. It features WINDFORCE 3X Cooling System with alternate spinning fans. The WINDFORCE 3X cooling system features 3x 80mm unique blade fans, alternate spinning, 5 composite copper heat pipes direct touch GPU, 3D active fan, and Screen cooling, which together provide high-efficiency heat dissipation. Alternate spinning reduces the turbulence of adjacent fans and increases air pressure. It ensures smooth airflow. The 3D Active Fan provides semi-passive cooling, and the fans will remain off when the GPU is in a low load or low power game. Graphene nano lubricant can extend the life of the fan by 2.1 times, close to the life of double ball bearing, and is quieter. The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 GAMING OC PRO features an extended heatsink design that allows airflow to pass through, providing better heat dissipation.

DirectX 12 Ultimate

DirectX12 Ultimate gives game developers the power to deliver immersive visuals with real-time DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback, taking games to the next level.

AMD FidelityFX

AMD FidelityFX is an open-source image-quality toolkit comprising seven different solutions available for game developers to implement into their games that are optimized for AMD RDNA and RDNA 2 architectures.

AMD Radeon Image Sharpening

Restores clarity to in-game images that have been softened by other post-process effects. RIS combines with GPU upscaling to provide sharp visuals at fluid frame rates on very high-resolution displays and works across DirectX 9, 12, and Vulkan titles.

AMD FreeSync 2 Technology

Reduce screen tearing with AMD’s FreeSync 2 Technology. FreeSync 2 enables the monitor to dynamically adjust its refresh rate to the frame rate being output by the graphics card, thereby greatly reducing screen tearing, stuttering, and other artifacts.

Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT EAGLE 8GB Review

AMD launched this week a refreshed Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650, which is simply an overclocked Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT with faster memory. The cores are clocked ~2% higher and the GDDR6 memory is 9% faster, both of which have increased the board power rating by 13% to 180 watts.

Now you might think, a slightly faster Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT isn’t a bad thing, even if it’s only ~5% faster. However, the 6600 XT is nearly a year old and it was a late release in the cycle. The first RDNA2 GPUs arrived in November 2020 and we’re expecting RDNA3-based products to land before the end of this year. That means an effective 6600 XT replacement is about 12 months away.

Even in this scenario, an extra 5-10% performance could be welcomed if free, but that’s not the case. Despite the sharp downturn in graphics card pricing (back to normalcy), in a baffling move AMD decided to refresh much of their existing RDNA2 lineup while jacking up pricing in the process.

We’ll discuss pricing some more towards the closing of the review. For now let’s check out performance to see if the Radeon RX 6650 XT has any surprises for us. On hand for testing we have the Power Color Hellhound Spectral White and Sapphire Nitro+ models and we’ve used the Spectral White to represent 6650 XT performance.

All AMD and Nvidia GPUs have been tested at the official clock specifications, so no factory overclocking. All the data in this review is fresh and was gathered in the past week using the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 32GB of dual-rank, dual-channel DDR4-3200 CL14 memory on the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme using the latest BIOS supporting the AGESA 1207 microcode. We’ve tested 10 games at 1080p and 1440p, so let’s get into the data.

Starting with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction, we see a 6% performance jump from the 6600 XT to the 6650 XT, about what we were expecting to see. This allowed the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT to match the RTX 3060, not exactly an exciting increase and if it were free we’d take it.

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6650 XT EAGLE 8GB Graphics Card 02 years warranty.