At this point, I'll just keep my RX 480 forever

This "anything goes" mentality from GPU manufacturers is so consistently disgusting that it is no longer a surprise at this point.

My first reaction was "how could it be worse than the gddr4 1030 refresh?" then I remembered Nvidia didn't charge what's looking to be close to $300 for it.

Absolutely mind boggling that we are moving backwards with this generation. The RX 5500 XT 8GB and RX 580 GB were both generational improvements in this segment, and amd squeezed another 10-20% performance out of the rx5500xt with driver updates, later placing it above the rx 590 often times. Now we are stuck with this pcie x4 lane garbage with a 64 bit memory bus. Looks like amd took a laptop gpu and is selling it for desktop card prices. Edit: Yeah, no shit the market is fucked people. Nvidia is going to manage to put out a non-shit card somehow in the rtx 3050 for $250. Scalpers/miners are going to buy it and the 6500 endlessly no matter what, so it hardly matters. Amd may as well take a slice of the profiteering cake with this generational regression. It just sucks its come to this. In a year to a year and a half once lots of new fab capacity comes online, this card will quietly slip away into the anals of shit gpu value history.

27:46 imo sums it up perfectly - limit one or the other if you *must*, but both is just silly.

"Welcome to Hardware Better Left in the Box." Makes me really wish I had gotten a 1650S while they were readily available at MSRP.

If anything, I feel like comparing the RX 6500 XT to older GPUs (like the RX 570) softens the blow of how bad this card is by having something close to it in the comparison charts. If you were to show it only compared to cards released in the past year or two, that would really paint the picture of how horrible this is for a new graphics card.

Thank you for the honest reviews and hardwork guys. This is appreciated by the community and is great to see that not everyone is susceptible to paid reviews. Keep up the good work 🙌

The longer this generation goes on, the more I appreciate the RX 590 I picked up on sale for $180 mid-2020.

Hardware Unboxed is a real gem of the community. Always honest and pro-consumer. Thank you for what you guys do 👍

It's impressive for the wrong reasons that the 6500 XT, even in the PCIe 4.0 config, is worse than the card it's supposed to replace - the 5500 XT. Not to mention the lack of features and less display ports. This is literally a regression in every single way and it's shocking how bad it is. At this point I have no faith that the 3050 will be any better.

Lowering both ends of the card to make it artificially bad to fit in the line up is a sad moment. Also gives hints on how much the companies make % profit on those cards. We need new players in the system.

I knew it is going to be a failure, I just didn't expect the level, the extreme proportion, of a catastrophic fail this is. I never knew there is going to be a GPU that I am not going to buy, EVEN AT MSRP, in 2022's GPU market, but here we are.

This is even more embarrassing than I expected. This card might actually be worth less than $100 in a normal market. It's a new tier below the Rx 550

Seeing reviews like this proves why we appreciate the hard work that Steve puts into them. Comprehensive, quality editorials that keep consumers interests in mind and hardware manufacturers in check.

Well, the goal is wide open for Intel. Never thought I’d be seriously considering an Intel GPU for my Ryzen system - and yet here we are.

No matter how bad the situation is in the market, we must NEVER accept mediocrity.

With how painfully mediocre the 6500XT is, I'd honestly be surprised to see it go very far above MSRP (and stay there). That says a lot.

I kind of a fan of this card while also supporting the review: My brother was really suffering when his good old Rx 570 gave up it's heavy duty life. I only got an even much older R5 laying around (obviously lacking much funds also). I was very happy when someone in june sold me a less than 6 month old 6500 for 120 euros (=dollars). Even the many years old 970 went for about the same (with high risk of low rest life). So I am very happy that this underdelivering cheapo exists and everyone hates on it. At least my brother can not replay his old fav games in same or slightly better quality.

I have this graphics card and it works just fine. When you have a build just sitting there because other cards are 3x their msrp then anything you can buy at retail is better than giving your money to scalpers. Down the road when card prices are normalized then I will grab a better card at a better price. But having this card is better than simply using an APU which I was stuck doing. It doubled my frame rate, it was available, and it will be usable for at least a year which is when I expect more robust cards will be back down to normal.

Ah lovely, low end GPU’s that still cost more than GPU’s half a decade ago.

Given that the 6500 XT drops below the 5500 XT in multiple runs, I really hope this is a driver issue. Otherwise this card would be a complete joke, honestly.

Thank you. This is a reference of reviews now! GN has a lot to learn from this in my humble opinion.

Hardware Unboxed, you're the best! Please stay honest, you're doing the consumers a serious favour every single video you make

This card is impressive for all the wrong reasons.

18:00 Jesus Christ, I never expected to see my RX570 (which is actually a rebranded boosted RX470) get better results years later than a new AMD card. (On a PCIE 3.0 system like mine)

Really appreciate the real world cost per frame analysis, Steve. It really helps us answer the question “if I see this card at MSRP, should I buy it?” Hope to see this in more reviews going forward!

Man Im so glad I still have my working GTX 1660 super from an old pre built Lenovo that I swapped parts with about a year ago lol. It’s still a mid power house can still play anything fine at 1080 and even 1440p at medium settings

How the hell does a card's successor regress in performance in comparison to the card from the previous older generation it's meant to replace?

GT 1030 replacement for $200...I mean $300+. Welcome to 2022 everybody.

I saw the GN gpu coaster there. A man of culture I see. Bravo! Love it when they throw little things like that here and there.

I've been running on an RX 480 4 GB for years now. Was hoping to get a reasonably priced 6700XT sometime this decade, not a drop-in replacement for the 480. And oddly enough, the RX 480 was going for $200 back in the day. Moore's Law truly is dead.

This is the first time for me to see that the model of the previous generation is better than the latest card at this level. I mean, the RX5500XT 8GB is way better than the RX6500XT 😂

Bought a RX 480 for 263€ in Feb of 2017. It's the XFX GTR with an amazing VRM design. I've since ghetto-modded it with Arctic P12 fans and it runs 1350 MHz and 2200 MHz memory while staying below 75°C and being whisper quiet. Now, almost 5 years later I get the opportunity to buy a GPU with less media capabilities and the same performance (or less!) for the same amount of money. Thanks AMD!

well thats a relif. i was close to buy this card for my budget gaming pc but thx to the rev i will keep my old GALAX GeForce® GTX 1070 EXOC-SNPR WHITE - EXOC-SNPR Series that is 4-5 years old. thx alot. keep up the good work. =)

You know, if they just made it 8x instead of 4x it probably would've been very similar on 3.0 in pretty much all games. 4x is too little for 3.0 but 8x is right at the spot where it's like "yeah, that's good enough for 3.0 on this card."

At this point, it feels even insulting to declare this mass heap of disappointment as an RX 480 ver. 4.0

Why are companies doing this? Is it just because it will sell regardless? AMD and Nvidia both...please...for goodness sake just do something good for your customers.

Thanks for including a SAM sample, you guys rock!

The local Micro Center (Tustin CA) has dozens of $199.99 cards as of noon today.

As someone who went from a 1050ti in a laptop to a 4GB RX 570 to an RX 5700, I know what it's like to hover in the low-mid range. We deserve better than the RX 6500XT. Gross AMD, just gross.

Seems to me that this laptop gpu basically came with the limitations of 4gb vram, pci-e limited just to 4x and its performance. Under normal circumstances it has no business on the desktop, and especially not at it's current price. If they just named it the 6400xt and released it at € 100 or so if they released it at all, it would have seemed more reasonable. Sadly in the current market reasonable simply does not exist when it comes to gpu's.

Please review any future non-x16 cards at PCIe 3.0 as well! I worry that some RDNA 3 models might have x8 PCIe and that they won't perform well on my PCIe 3.0 system, especially at 1440p.

Great. With such release, I feel in the upper class with my gtx 1060 6gb !

Imagine releasing a GPU so terrible, it struggles to outperform a god-damn GPU from 20-fucking-19. GG AMD, you've outdone yourselves...

AMD is throwing away the momentum they gained with Ryzen and the first RDNA 2 releases like they are in Nvidia's or Intel's position. A real shame.

Honestly if I was in the market for a low end GPU I might have taken the 6500XT over a second hand 580, only because it's brand new with a warranty. I bought a really clean 580 2 years ago second hand before the boom, but prior to that I had a second-hand R9 290 that died and took my motherboard with it. In Durban we have a lot of humidity, so I think that caused corrosion on the VRMs and somehow sent 12V over the PCI-e lanes or something.

I just realized how similar the opposite terms "corner cutting" and "cutting edge" sound

Almost unbelievable AMD could release a disaster product like this on the low-end segment. RX 5500 XT is faster despite being older and it was never a great gaming Graphics Card although at least it was good. Oh man.... AMD should've branded this RX 6300 or 6400 instead and should be priced lower! It's a terribly embarrassing product for RDNA2. And the power efficiency...! What the hell is wrong with AMD? 6nm GPU with worse power efficiency than 12nm GPU! Oh man.... I hope Radeon RX 680M is faster than this.

Jesus Christ... I'm actually glad I recommended my mate to get an AMD 590 at under $200 in 2019! He got an absolute steal compared to shit-show 2022.

If the 6500XT had encoding, didn't require a 6pin power connector, cost less than $150, and came in SFF options... it would have been a godsend.

When stuck on a old Radeon R7 200 the new 6500XT at $200 is a nice performance increase when you do not have $350 to spend on a 1650.. and they are in stock at that price today!

AMD has mostly had issus this generation with good cards bad pricing, I think this is the first time they’ve managed to hit bad card bad pricing. I consider that an achievement

They should have drop the "XT" that way they could have a (somewhat weak) justification for the reduced performances than the previous gen 5500XT.

I have an idea, when you get all those board partner cards in you could do a video about what it's like to not have the features that other cards have. Saying what features it's missing is one thing, but showing what that really means would be interesting.

I'm glad you used the HD texture pack. IMHO you should use the max textures for all titles as I don't think any game has a ridiculously high texture size for modern GFX cards. I also hate how manufacturers keep skimping on memory, that was an Nvidia ploy, and they need to be brought to account.

Geeze you're good. You hit this one out of the park. WELL DONE STEVE - standing up for individuals that aren't tech savvy to stop them from wasting their hard earned money.

This is really that AMD had a lot of unused laptop dies that they could not sell. And dumped it on the desktop marked as a very low end GPU. Knowing that they would sell anyway

I was facing this choice for my budget build between the 6500XT and the 1650 non super as there prices were the same and ended up choosing the 1650, Yes it performed slightly worse than the 6500XT being limited to pcie 3.0 but i just couldnt swallow no av1 encoder and lack of gameplay recording were the biggest deal breakers.

Keep up the good work Steve! TY for an honest review.

I love the comparisons to the older lower end cards, really help understand that lack of upgrade here, but also helps anyone with an older card understand where they stand. Thank you for all the hard work in testing all these cards!!!

At some point a product becomes too compromised to be released. You cut back on features so much that it starts to fall below minimum standards. That's exactly what we have with the 6500 XT. To launch a graphics card in 2022 and have it fall behind 1050 Ti is absolutely unacceptable 🤦‍♂️ I know people are desperate for GPUs, but at what point are you knowingly selling them a deficient product? Keep these chips in laptops and you have no problems, but put them in desktops and suddenly you have a product that is barely fit for purpose.

This was the most thorough roast I've seen in a while.

I guess I'll look forward to the RDNA2 APUs in AM5 RYZEN CPUs "IF" it reaches this kind of performance. For a discrete GPU this is just bluntly awful. To think that even the RX 460 can use ReLive while this cannot.

This is just what i expected with that reduced pcie bandwidth and the low cu count. But still when i see these numbers, it's really unbelievable that this is actually a real product. What i didn't expect though was the creator crap power consumption numbers. The 1650 super is made using a much older node. The 6500xt should be much more efficient. I don't understand just how they made it so bad

This card is pretty much a failure and pretty embarrassing, can't wait for Intel Arc GPUs to hopefully shake up the discrete GPU market duopoly

Makes my RX 590 look like a beast still, particularly considering I am running a Threadripper 2950x which is PCIe 3.0. I am glad I didn't sell it when it's used price went over what I payed for it new, I would have had a hell of a time replacing it with something equal or better.

Jesus! I'm just glad I was able to get the RX 5600 XT at MSRP before the mining craze started guess I'll stick to it till it dies! The only caveat I have with the card is the random black screens but those are fixed with driver updates. (Although it still does happen albeit rare)

"Welcome to Hardware reboxed, where we rebox hardware that should never have been unboxed"

I knew this thing was going to be a dud... but I at least expected it to beat the 5500 XT by about 10%... but the damn thing couldn't even do that. I had hoped the 16MB of L3 cache, and the asinine clock speeds would help offset the 64-bit bus limitations but it seems all it did was allow the 6500 XT to keep it's head above water... barely.

Hi, I was planning on getting the new 3050 rtx but in case I'm not able to, the 1650 ddr6 and 6500 xt are the only ones available right now in budget where I live. But I keep hearing 6500 xt is really bad for content creators. What do you think I should do?

We will be seeing this card in a ton of prebuilds.

Somehow AMD managed to create a GPU that most people will probably never even want to buy even at MSRP. I don't know if this is more sad, insulting, or laughable. The only good thing that might come from this launch is the faint possibility that, maybe, some scalpers will take a financial hit trying to resell these cards. No one should buy this card. Seriously though... this product needs to fail. This needs to be such an epic flop that AMD is forced to go back to the drawing board and actually try to release something competitive.

As soon as I saw the specs, I was shocked at the measly 64-bit bus. Wondering why on earth would it have such a small bus. Hell, even the very first GPU I ever bought back in the early 2000s (ATI Radeon 9800 Pro) had a 256-bit bus. I know a lot of midrange cards these days still work perfectly only needing 128-bit buses. But 64? I literally couldn't remember ever seeing a card with such a small bus. So much so I actually had to look it up to see what other card had that small of a bus. GT 1030 is what came up.... nuff said. What was AMD thinking with this one? Surely they knew that small of a bus was going to seriously hamper this card's ability to keep up with the throughput. Is this a limitation of the laptop GPU? Or was AMD hoping the higher bandwidth of the PCIE 4.0 interface would make up for the losses in the bus width? Either way, that's a bad call. Especially when AMD is well aware that PCIE 4.0 adoption is still pretty low at this point, and even more especially when many PC gamers don't have enough hardware knowledge to know at a glance what "bus width" means nor how it relates to performance. At least not enough to recognize and relate that to the PCIE standard on their motherboard in "their" own PC. From where I stand, this may not be "as bad" as the whole GT 1030 DDR4 fiasco Nvidia pulled, but it's still pretty bad. Especially at this price point. This is a midrange price point (yes I consider any card between $200-$400 midrange) for what is clearly a budget card. What's worse, is it's a midrange price point for a card that can so easily be gimped to bottom of the barrel budget performance from something so simple as installing it in "common" PCs of today since most of the current adopted market, still have PCIE 3.0 interfaces in them. That's not acceptable in my opinion. And AMD shouldn't have the right to use the excuse "well it's your fault because you should've known better from the specs on the card and your PC" in this scenario. AMD are selling this as a midrange GPU when they damn well know the vast majority of the current market would only end up getting bottom of the barrel budget performance from it. That may not technically be false advertising. But it sure as hell is misleading advertising. EDIT: Only just caught the bit about this card only being able to utilize PCIE to 4X.... (Literally just facepalmed myself and am at a complete loss for words...I honestly don't know what to say)... This card is an embarrassment.

Very interested to see a Hardware Unboxed comparison of the 12600K v the 12650H to get a sense of what UHD770 vs Xe looks like.

Wow great job including stuff like gaming average summary, average price per frame, and average eBay price per frame. It's rare to ever see data like that, and it's super useful for so many people. I'm kind of surprised that the 1650 super and 1050 Ti are on opposite ends of the MSRP per frame comparison considering that they're both older gen cards with similar price, but then again I haven't followed either of them too much in any depth.

I had hoped that the tiny infinity cache could mitigate some of the memory and pcie bandwidth deficit. Guess not. This should be priced at 75-100 dollers imo, but with supply constraints and TSMC hiking prices an additional 20%, its probably priced fairly market wise. Given it can be had at MSRP.

AMD had such an opportunity to grab this section of the market, such a shame Intel and Nvidia will be rubbing its hands. May as well as just make a good APU for this end of the market.

There used to be AGP slots for a card... Guess I'll keep litterally breaking my own back at my job for a decent GPU maybe one day.., reevaluating life priorities, change life style, buying other stuff,never getting there ...

Man that intro had serious "I'm not mad, I'm just dissapointed vibes". Absolutely savage.

I think its fair to say that the RX580 and GTX 1060 can finally join the 8600GT as one of the most trusty cards ever made

Welp, I guess that's it then. Possibly the last "sub $200" GPU to be released for the foreseeable future, maybe ever (except for maybe GT cards).

I'm so glad I didn't listen to the multitude of UKpostsrs carrying on and on about how bad this card is, and went out and bought the Asus TUF version. It cost me half of what the closest competitive card was going for, and it runs everything that I play at a respectable framerate with pretty much all high settings at 1080P. On a PCIE 3 board. On Fedora Linux.

Rocking and loving my overclocked RX570 but still upset that there is no reasonable upgrade yet :')

Steve, crystal ball type of question: Do you think, once the stock/mining/scalping situation resolves, that every segment price (X070, X080, X800 XT, etc) will rise for future generations considering NVIDIA's 3080 12GB release and AMD's 6500XT? Do you think it's naive-thinking to expect, for example, X070 performance to remain at the $500 mark (once the current landscape is resolved)? I can't fathom why AMD would deliver this level of performance for $200 and I definitely agree that the 3080 12GB was just a gimmick they pulled because they realized $700 is low for a $3080.

Despite the rather anemic spec sheet I was hoping for a little more here. Locally there are a few cards available at 199 and the Sapphire is 219 but even at MSRP there are just too many trades to make on this one. We all know the market is in shambles but yikes. The only reason to pick one of these up IMO is someone putting together a PCIE 4 based system and having no other option. A stopgap at best. This is likely what AMD is doing here. The incentive is to build a new Ryzen B550 or X570 system and pick up a 6500xt to get by for now.

i not that it is offtopic but should i use resizable bar on 3060ti paired with 5800x and b550 motherboard? Will i see any difference or lose performance?

I think you nailed it Steve. $200 and no more as long as you don't need hardware encoding or more than 2 video outs. I still see 6500 XT models at $199, so for that use case, I think it makes sense, seeing that the 1650, 1660 super, etc are $350-$500 depending on model, if you can actually find them. So for a new GPU (some people won't or are not allowed(kids) to buy used), in the $200, range, this is about the only viable option for 1080p gaming.

Spot on with your review here Steve, thanks! I knew when you released the investigative RX 5500 XT pcie scaling video that you must have already run some tests on this card, otherwise you wouldn't be bringing it up as a potential issue! I considered myself leaning towards the team red fanboyism but the amount of people wo were convinced that pcie 3.0 x4 wouldn't be an issue due to IC, SAM or any other excuse, was quite shocking!

As expected, the RX 6500XT was never meant for discrete graphics for the desktop computer market. It was initially designed and intended for the notebook and laptop computer segment. The entire architecture of this card was meant for a product segment that rarely ever surpassed 1080p gaming and all connections of the product indicate that this item was meant as an internal device to only have at best two output options. The goal of such a device was to save on energy consumption and not performance in game rendering. I see this as a slap in the face in the reputation of AMD, because the product is not actually a product line designed for the market segment it is attempting to sell into. On a long term perspective on AMD's intentions, if they do not have a GPU product line for the 200 dollar price point, that means the chip architecture they used for the RX 6600 was meant to drop into the 200 to 300 dollar range in it's life expectancy in terms of sales, but the card has done the opposite and sold around the 600 dollar price point.

In all fairness, there is a hefty stock of these things at the microcenter near me, and the powercolor itx version can be had at its $200 msrp. In that same store, 6600's are starting at $460. But there is consistent stock, at least.

Holy shit my RX 5600XT is so good, I didn't appreciate what I had enough. Thank you AMD for making me realise that.

I admit, i was defending this release after i saw your 5500XT test video few days ago...i hoped that the 6500XT with the Infinity cache would be at least on the same level or a bit better... But i am disappointed now. Indeed this would be a good laptop GPU not a desktop GPU for 200€ and without HW video decoders. But hey good news are miners will leave it alone.

AMD be like "y'all thought 5500xt was bad,have a look at this" 💀😭😂

I have no clue about PC building. I’ve been studying today, I’d like to get off of console and move into a PC. On iBuyPower if I select this Video Card over the GeForce GTX 1650 it changes from 75 to 115 FPS at 1080p for Warzone. I assume this is just fluff advertising and not true numbers? Glad I checked UKposts before shelling out $. Any recommendations on sites for a first build that would be an upgrade from my Xbox Series X performance?

I recently got offered a 2080 ti blower card. is there any 3rd party cooler system i can use on it other than running a full custom loop?

When we asked for an affordable entry level gpu, this isn't what we meant AMD. This ain't it chief!

I'm glad we have reviewers like you to call it how it is. I have a question though! Do you think AMD are thinking about the upcoming pcie gen 5 on the next CPU generation and are now scaling their GPU production to attempt to save money in this area? e.g are thinking they will get away with x8 or x4 bandwidth for pcie gen 5 GPUs in the future?

Typically a good use case for cards in this class is to upgrade an older system. But with the awful PCIe restriction, this isn't even good for that!

Thx for clip test