Radeon RX 6500 XT review - Product Photos

Product Photos

Any Radeon RX 6500 XT will be equipped with 4 Gigabytes of GDDR6 memory, it will be connected to a 64-bit wide memory bus, which is a severe limitation for a graphics card of this series. AMD is attempting to compensate for the limited memory bus by running that memory at 16 Gbps (effective data rate) and by incorporating an additional L3 cache on the GPU die (on-die) (16MB). When it comes to Full HD and WQHD resolutions, both will assist you; however, once the L3 cache is depleted and VRAM runs out, which will occur mostly in GPU-bound situations, you can expect to see a huge performance hit.

In this class, the Fighter from PowerColor is considerably simpler to use as an entry-level graphics card than it is with a high-end one, and so only partially lives up to a premium designation. It has two fans and remains silent though. Our card has stock clocked frequencies, so you're looking at reference performance.

With the exception of the shorter length, the cooler's design is remarkably similar to that of the larger branch. The Radeon RX 6500 XT Gaming X has only one 6-pin power connector, even when overclocked. The cooler must dissipate the official ~120 watt TGP (GPU + memory) and 150-watt TBP (complete graphics card) That 6-pin PCIe connector indicates it has a maximum power of 150 watts, which is in line with the specs. The cards all get HDMI 2.1 connector and the latest iteration in DisplayPort. Most cards will hold a 6 or 8-pin headers configuration depending on AIC/AIB choices as partner cards are free to choose to use whatever they deem applicable. 

By the way, AMD limited the PCI Express bus towards 4 lanes, so that's x4 PCIe Gen 4.0 or 3.0. We've added some additional content on the differential, as on PCIe 3.0 it really is lowering performance.