- Soon Kai Hong
The Radeon RX 7600 Makes The RTX 4060 Ti Look Stupid
Updated: Dec 19, 2023
This is the Radeon RX 7600 and it retails for just US$269. For that, you get a cute, nifty little card that’ll probably fit in almost any small form factor PC case there is and will also be an absolute beast when it comes to 1080P gaming. Seriously, we mean it. Over 60 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080P Ultra and a steady 120 frames per second in Modern Warfare at 1080P Ultra.
Best of all, it runs whisper quiet while gaming and still maintains a temperature of just about 75C. For the price, we say it’s a no brainer. We’re seriously impressed.
It’s been quite some time since AMD has announced any new graphics card. We covered the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT back when it launched and those are amazing cards in their own right. Perhaps more so with the XTX, considering the performance and the price. Now sure, everything is getting more expensive nowadays and that’s a shame but compared to the competition, AMD is still very much more reasonable.
But there are still many of us who can’t throw that amount of money on a graphics card alone.
This is where the Radeon RX 7600 comes in, an entry level graphics card that certainly hits the sweet spot for many gamers out there. We’re talking about 1080P and even 1440P gaming and after putting it through much testing, we’re seriously impressed.
And as you probably already know from the title, this card makes the RTX 4060 Ti look extremely stupid.
Design
But before we get into the numbers and all that, let’s talk a little bit about the card itself because for our review unit, we did get this directly from AMD themselves and so what you see here is the reference design. We’re definitely glad to see that AMD has stuck to the same design scheme as with their flagship cards and it honestly looks great.
If you’ve seen how the reference RX 7900 XTX or XT looks like, the RX 7600 is basically a compact version of those. You still get that all black stealth design with red accents, complete with a metal backplate. But because it’s just that much smaller of a card, there’s two fans, it is a proper 2-slot card and you only need 1x 8-pin for power.
We have it here in our Asus Prime AP201 and it fits in amazingly well.
Specs & Comparison w/ RX 6600
Honestly, we really like the reference design of the card and you might be surprised but it performs extraordinarily well. But now let’s quickly go through the specs and compare it to what it replaces, the RX 6600.
The RX 7600 basically features more compute units and ray accelerators, higher clock speeds, faster memory speeds, 2nd-gen Infinity Cache, HDMI 2.1 support and AV1 hardware encoding. And of course, you get all of that at a much lower launch price of US$269.
With AMD’s own internal testing at 1080P Ultra settings, they claim roughly 29% higher performance as compared to the RX 6600 and 34% faster compared to the RTX 3060. That is a pretty bold claim because the performance difference is sizable and it’s even more affordable at that.
So it goes without saying that we had to test it for ourselves.
For our testing, we’re using the PC that we built rather recently. Here’s the full spec list at a glance but the most important to note would be that we’re using the Ryzen 7 7800X3D that’s paired with the ROG Strix LC II 360 AiO and that should pretty much take care and prevent any CPU bottleneck.
The case is well ventilated and we’re testing in a room which is kept at a constant 24C. One disclaimer however is that we actually didn’t have that much time to be able to test all the 10 games in our usual benchmarking procedures, so we decided to just focus on 5 key game titles and we’re also only taking a look at performance at 1080P and 1440P.
If you’re looking for 4K gaming, this is not enough, we’ll just say it outright now. But without further ado, let’s dive into the benchmarks.
Again, we can only really say one thing. We’re seriously impressed. 1080P is still a fantastic resolution and this is one beast of a graphics card if that’s your jam. Again, near 90 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080P Ultra and you can even hit nearly 120 frames per second should you turn on FSR 2.1.
Or if you would like a little more realism by turning on ray-tracing, you can do that too. But of course, go easy on those settings because AMD is still primarily not as invested in ray-tracing as of yet.
But again, Apex Legends, Modern Warfare 2, they all play great. You can also do 1440P depending on the game or even 4K but we would say that this is still primarily a 1080p card and that’s where you can really enjoy those high frame rates.
Impressive Temperature and Noise Management
So the performance is already really impressive, but what made it even more impressive was the thermal performance and the acoustics while gaming. With this AMD reference design, we measured just about 75C during load and a noise level that we can’t even measure properly given our noise floor. But we can definitely vouch that as long as there’s good airflow, it is whisper-quiet and you barely notice it, even if your rig is on the desk.
So, all bells and whistles right?
8GB VRAM Can Be Limiting. Depending.
Well… that depends.
Right now, we only have the reference RX 7600 which features 8GB of VRAM. And you might think that 8GB is plenty for 1080P but if you’re someone who plans to max out all the game settings, 8GB is surprisingly not quite enough even at 1080P. For instance, when we tested Resident Evil 3, we had to lower the Shadow Quality down from Max to High because just that one setting alone maxed out our VRAM, causing frequent stutters during gameplay because the memory usage is just spilling over.
The same is true for Apex Legends. Spot Shadow Detail takes up a whole lot of VRAM and 8GB is not enough for the Insane setting.
Though as we say all that, this probably isn’t that huge of a deal as generally do not recommend running your games at Ultra or Max settings in the first place. There really is diminishing returns going from High to Ultra or higher. So, if we’re just talking about 1080P High, you’re going to get an extremely enjoyable experience with better frame rates at that.
But now let’s talk about price and the competition. And this is really the icing on the cake.
US$269 Is Insane. Puts The RTX 4060 Ti To Shame.
For US$269, there’s nothing quite like the Radeon RX 7600. At the moment, its supposed direct competitor would be the upcoming RTX 4060 that’ll go for US$299 but at this point in time, we can actually already make some great inference given that the RTX 4060 Ti has launched.
If we were to borrow some of the findings of the RTX 4060 Ti that has already been published, you’ll be surprised to know that the RX 7600 offers just about 10% less performance in comparison. For example in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080P Ultra without FSR or DLSS, which means we’re just talking pure rasterization performance here, the RTX 4060 Ti achieves about 100 frames per second on average while the RX 7600 achieves about 89 frames per second on average.
But, the RTX 4060 Ti costs US$399. The RX 7600 costs just US$269. I don’t think we really need to explain much further. If we’re talking about the RTX 4060 however at US$299. If that performs the same as this, it might still make sense. But the RTX 4060 Ti? Forget it.
We HIGHLY RECOMMEND It.
Anyways, what can we say, we’re seriously impressed.
If you’re upgrading from a GTX 1060, RTX 2060 or 2060 Super and you want a sizable upgrade without spending a whole lot of money, the RX 7600 is honestly a worthy upgrade, especially for the price. Heck, even if you’re just using the last generation RX 6600 which this directly replaces, it is enough of a performance uplift to entice an upgrade.
AMD is doing great things, tier for tier. Definitely not something we can say about NVIDIA this generation.
Again, we’re just impressed with what this nifty little card is capable of. We highly recommend it.