Overall and Final Verdict
When I took a look at the Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX reference cards I was a big fan of the design that AMD put together and I like that the Radeon RX 7600 has continued with that same styling. The all-metal shroud gives it the quality construction feeling that Nvidia has also hit with their Founders Editions. AMD hasn’t gone completely off the trail with the design like Nvidia has, the Radeon RX 7600 has a relatively standard cooler design with both fans on one side and the card doesn’t extend past the end of the PCB at all to get the blow-thought design. The blacked-out look should look great in any build as well. I also like that the card has stayed with a compact design including the dual-slot thickness, not sticking up past the top of the PCI bracket, and not being too long. This is the size card that helps make extremely small SFF systems possible. It also has a standard 8-pin power connection which means you don’t need to worry about the upgrade to ATX 3.0 just yet.
The RX 7600 did well in our testing, especially at 1080p where it is designed to be used, and in the games it was surprisingly close in performance to the RTX 3060 Ti. We have to wait a while longer to find out where the RTX 4060 which will be the direct competition from Nvidia for this GPU, but so far it is looking good. It did fall behind in our compute tests, this isn’t an ideal card if you are hoping to use it for blender as well as gaming. It also falls a little behind when it comes to ray tracing, but AMD has made some good improvements in that area this generation.
The big downside for this specific card though is its overall cooling performance. With the stock fan profile, it struggled and ran at a surprisingly high RPM. This isn’t helped by the overall wattage that it pulls when we compare it to a card like the RTX 4060 Ti. The Radeon RX 7600 was up at the top of the efficiency chart compared to all of the last generation of cards but way behind compared to any of the current generation of cards including both of the RX 7900. It’s a shame too because in the base fan tests the Radeon RX 7600 was shockingly quiet, but it lost that advantage when it had to run at ¾ fan speed under load.
AMD has the MSRP of the Radeon RX 7600 set at $269 which is exciting. Both Nvidia and AMD cards from this generation have been expensive and Nvidia missed the mark with their RTX 4060 Ti so AMD has a big opportunity by pricing the Radeon RX 7600 at $269 to gain market share with a card designed for 64% of users setups at a price point that doesn’t make my wallet run away immediately in fear. The Radeon RX 7600 reference card may not be the best solution if heat is a concern, but the RX 7600 GPU as a whole is looking promising.
Live Pricing: HERE
