It may be laborious to discover a PC gaming graphics card at a low value lately, however nonetheless low your finances is, we totally advocate staying away from the brand new Asus Radeon RX 6500 XT Twin OC V2 that’s simply come out. Not solely is it based mostly on a GPU that’s now two and half years previous, however this GPU stank even again then.
Asus makes among the finest graphics playing cards you should purchase proper now, and I significantly just like the quiet and highly effective coolers on its newest ROG Strix playing cards, even when they’re a bit overpriced. A graphics card is barely nearly as good because the GPU beneath its cooler, although, and whereas AMD makes some first rate GPUs, the Radeon RX 6500 XT is unquestionably not one in all them.
AMD wouldn’t even ship me a pattern for evaluate when it got here out, and neither would any of the board companions I contacted. You solely want to take a look at among the different press protection to see why. Launched in January 2022, Radeon RX 6500 XT critiques weren’t simply dangerous, they have been scathing, and generally even expletive-ridden. GamersNexus stated it was “worse than 2016’s GPUs,” as proven within the video under, whereas {Hardware} Unboxed merely described it because the “worst GPU” in its evaluate.
What went flawed? Forged your thoughts again to 2022, when there was a worldwide GPU scarcity and it was unattainable to purchase any graphics playing cards at their MSRP. There was a niche out there for a finances GPU, and it didn’t even actually should be any good for folks to doubtlessly hand over $200 for it. That was when AMD launched the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which now stands as a major instance of what occurs while you lower too many corners.
Based mostly on the Navi 24 GPU used for AMD’s cell GPUs on the time, this desktop card had simply 1,024 stream processors, which was half the quantity on the massively superior Radeon RX 6600 XT, however that was solely the beginning of its issues. AMD additionally outfitted it with a particularly tight 64-bit reminiscence interface, leading to a pitiful reminiscence bandwidth of simply 143.9GB/s, and also you solely obtained 4GB of VRAM too.
Not solely that, however AMD outfitted the cardboard with a miserly 4x PCIe 4.0 interface, which could be positive for the cardboard’s efficiency on a PCIe 4.0 system, however meant it solely had half that PCIe bandwidth on a PCIe 3.0 rig. This was an enormous deal in 2022, Intel’s Tenth-gen Comet Lake CPUs had come out simply two years earlier with no PCIe 4.0 assist, and loads of folks solely had older PCIe 3.0 motherboards for his or her AMD CPUs.
Anyway, for some cause Asus has simply launched a model new graphics card based mostly on this GPU. On the floor, it seems like a good card, with its two cooling followers and carbon fiber-esque look. Asus has even given it a good overclock, which takes the sport clock from 2,610MHz to 2,670MHz, however this gained’t be sufficient to make this card value shopping for.
Asus hasn’t introduced pricing for the brand new V2 card but, however the V1 model at the moment goes for $179 on Amazon, and you are able to do a lot better. If you actually need an affordable graphics card now, take my recommendation and keep away from this new Asus card, and as a substitute decide up a second-hand Radeon RX 6600 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 on eBay.
In the meantime, in case you’re on the lookout for a bit extra energy, the Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 from the present era gives you way more gaming efficiency in case you can afford them.
