This report was updated on 8/12/21- More information available at the bottom of the article.
As soon as AMD’s newly released 1080p-targetting graphics card hit store shelves, a report came out suggesting that the RX 6600 XT may be the most efficient Ethereum mining GPU available. In a video uploaded by Dizzy Mining, the user details the tuning methods they employed in order to get their MSI RX 6600 XT Gaming X 8G to operate at under 55W while maintaining mining performance of 32 MH/s. This would place it at well above even the Radeon VII in terms of mining efficiency, making it the best consumer graphics card available for mining.
However, as user Uzzi38 points out on Twitter, not all is as it seems. You see, unlike NVIDIA and even older Radeon graphics cards, the RDNA2-based RX 6000 series cards do not report Total Board Power in software. Instead, they report what is known as ASIC power, which is a combination of GPU Core + SoC + IMC + GDDR6 power. This may sound like a minor difference, but the reality is that the 6600 XT would actually be drawing much closer to 90W under these conditions, and that would place it far lower in the above chart and more in line with cards like the GTX 1660 series.
While I am unable to test this myself– I was able to verify these finding with another reviewer, Keith May of PCWorld, who upon testing the RX 6600 XT with NVIDIA’s pCAT tool in order to isolate Total Board Power, found that it did in fact draw closer to 90W with the same tuning applied.
UPDATE: Due to an error in the application of the tuning settings, the report of 90W is actually incorrect. With matched tuning settings to the original video, we’ve found that the RX 6600 XT actually draws 75W while mining. This would still suggest a PPW of 0.42666 which is roughly in line with the RX 6800 and RX 5700 XT in terms of efficiency.
We’ll have our full review of the RX 6600 XT available soon, but for now you can at least rest a little easier knowing that you won’t be having to fight with miners for this graphics card.
