It’s been an incredible year for both AMD and NVIDIA and their sales of graphics cards, which unfortunately due to crazy demand and lacking supply also made it a great year for scalpers. This left a gap in the market for budget conscious gamers who have been holding out before upgrading their rigs and after quite a few months there is finally a lower-end card aimed at 1080p gaming from AMD - it’s the RX 6600 XT. Here we have a version of this card from XFX - the Speedster Merc 308 Black. Let’s see what you get for your money.
MERC 308 Black is the higher-end version of the RX 6600 XT from XFX. In their Speedster series they also have QICK 308, as well as SWFT 210, if you want so save a little bit of money.
In this article we will focus on the card we have in front of us. It features a custom three fan design which pushes air towards aluminium heatsink with four piece nickel plated copper heat pipes. If we look closer we see a passthrough design which allows better heat dissipation.
This card features an all-black colour scheme, and it’s nice to see that it has an included back plate to keep it in line with the theme, with one exception - the label with the manufacturer's serial number is crooked and it really bothers me.
On the side we have LED illuminated logo, BIOS switch as well as 8 pin connection for power.
On the back there are three display 1.4 ports as well as a single HDMI 2.1 port.
This card features RDNA 2 “Navi 23” GPU with 32 Compute units, 32 MB of infinity cache, 8GB of GDDR6 memory running on 128 bit memory bus. AMD’s spec mentions TDP starting at 160W and 2359MHz Game Clock but as this is a custom design, we will check this and actual performance in the upcoming deeper-dive video, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Other features include support for Freesync, Display stream compression over display ports as well as all the latest RDNA 2 features like DirectX12 Ultimate, smart access memory, real time ray tracing and fidelity FX super resolution.
This XFX Mercury line of cards is designed for enthusiast gamers and all in all the unit seems to have plenty of cooling, considering its power class. It will be interesting to see how it performs.