PowerColor Fighter Gaming Graphics Card

This card is a bit of mixed bag. If you judge it for what it is - and not what it could have been if AMD tried harder - it's arguably the overall best choice in a new budget card and/or if looking for lower power consumption. It is a sad commentary on the state of budget cards that this counts as probably the best. But there simply is no competition in this segment. Nvidia has done a new budget card in 5-6 years. As far as 3D (games) performance goes this card is about as fast as Nvidia's GTX 1060 and AMD's Radeon 570/580 . Cards released in 2016/2017. The GTX 1650 (released 2019) is a bit slower but if you search you can find versions of that card that can run on the PCIe bus alone - no extra power cable needed. Appealing if upgrading an older computer with a modest power supply. My primary goal was finding the overall best combination of low power draw and still decent performance. The RX 580 can be had new here on Amazon for around $110. Performance is close but it it's rated at 185 watts and under stress pushes 200 watts. The RX 570 cannot be found new but lots of used on eBay. A claimed 120 watt power draw but they lie. The real world power consumption is very close to the RX 580. The GTX 1060 is probably faster than any of the other cards I've mentioned (not by much) but is rated at 180 watts and while a six year old design is still more expensive than any of the cards mentioned, including the RX 6500 XT being reviewed. A few other things. Nvidia cards are well known to stress 3D performance above 2D. So if you primarily play games the Nvidia cards are good to look at. But if you are doing a lot of picture editing or content creation, the 2D scores of Nvidia cards are notably lower. And AMD's cards are well known to suck substantially more power when using a two monitor set up versus a single monitor. One of the appeals of the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT - for me - is that power consumption for two monitors remains very reasonable. So anyway.... This card - the RX 6500 XT - is basically the little engine that could. It performs substantially better than you would think looking at the specs. Yes, only PCIe 4x lanes and running PCI 3 vs PCI 4 lowers performance. Yes, a narrow PCI bus (64 bit) and only 4GBs of memory. But the memory is extremely fast. And the clock speed of the GPU itself is extremely high. So if you keep game settings moderate so as to not exceed the 4GB onboard memory, this card delivers. Also of interest is that if your motherboard supports it, you can help this card a lot with faster system memory. Actually, AMD's cards seems especially found of faster memory. I'm running DDR 4 4000MHz memory on PCIe 3.0 and synthetic benchmarks are all 10-15% faster than normal for PCIe 4.0. Power draw - something really important to me just a hobbyist - is also appealing. The smaller brother RX 6400 only draws 53 watts and never needs an extra power connector. But it has just been cut back to much and is.... well .... not fast. Nvidia's GTX 1650 is rated at 75 watts (maximum for PCIe only) but is difficult to hard to find not requiring an extra power connector. This card, the RX 6500 XT - is rated at 107 watts and does require an extra six pin power connector. But my on tests using a watt meter (total system draw) and those of professional reviewers all say the same thing. The RX 6500 XT isn't using a lot of power. Single monitor idle is 2 watts. Dual monitor is 10 watts. Running games it is rarely above 85 watts and max at 100. Even if your computer is older and power supply low wattage, you can probably get a four to six pin adaptor and run this card. Overall, the card strikes a good balance between price, performance and power consumption. Sure, it would be a lot better card with 6 or 8GB of memory. Or more PCIe lanes and faster bus. Or both. But then consumers would probably have no reason to purchase the more expensive (and still a great value) RX 6600. At least AMD tries to offer a couple of new budget cards. Something Nvidia hasn't bothered with for a long, long time.