Sapphire Radeon RX 6650 XT Nitro+ review
Targeted at Full HD gaming and paired with faster running 8GB graphics memory meet the new Radeon RX 6650 XT. The series believe it or not carries a price of roughly 399~449 USD. AMD's rDNA 2 desktop graphics card line, the Radeon RX 6000 series, was released towards the end of 2020 and continued into 2021. The year 2022 is roughly halfway and AMD now revamps its RDNA 2 graphics card portfolio with a new family of graphics cards. All are rehashed and thus reconfigured products and that means this is not a new generation of cards, but rather an incremental improvement based on the same RDNA 2 architecture. The main difference here is the usage of quicker memory. All three graphics cards include up to 18Gbps GDDR6 memory chips, up from 16Gbps on non-50 versions. Some AIBs will configure the 6650 XT at 17.5 Gbps though with OC models configured at 18 GBps. All graphics cards also use a comparable GPU seen from their predecessor but will arrive with increased memory and boost/game clock rates. As such the AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT will sit above the Radeon RX 6900 XT, and the Radeon RX 6750 XT will sit above the Radeon RX 6700 XT. of course the Radeon RX 6650 XT will sit above the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Consider this to be AMD's own 'SUPER' however without any big advancements as the shader and RT count remain identical. The lineup is intended to provide performance enhancements ranging from 5-to-10%, and memory will play a significant role in meeting these performance objectives. Once again, the new lineup would be as follows:
We review the Sapphire Radeon RX 6650 XT Nitro+. This card is aimed at Full HD gaming and remains totally silent whilst running pretty cool. Looking at the quality build, you'd almost forget that this offers mainstream-level gaming entry. The Nitro+ variants are factory overclocked to even faster speeds. Memory and core clock speed increases do result in higher performance, but as you'll see in our benchmark section, they're only moderate. The Radeon RX 6650 XT has an average Game GPU frequency of 2,410MHz and a Boost clock of 2,635MHz. It also gets an increase in memory speed, from 16Gbps to 17.5Gbps. To meet such changes, the overall board power draw increased from 160W in the 6600 XT to 180W in the 6650 XT. The Radeon RX 6650 XT features Sapphire's wave fin heat sink design, which is designed to reduce air friction (and hence noise), as well as a V-shaped notch in the heat sink directly above the GPU to "accelerate and centralize the air flow in order to dissipate heat more effectively. This Radeon RX 6650 update is about progression rather than revolution.