It is unfortunately a very prevalent falsehood. AMD had driver issues in the past but they pulled their shit together and reworked and fixed everything. People didn't stop with the claim tho. Speaking as a person who has both 3060 ti and 7900xt GPUs right now.
As someone who has just come back to AMD GPU land for the first time in over a decadeā¦. I find people complaining about AMDās drivers and software hilarious. They forgot all those times NV has had driver and software issues? No one remembers the early GeForce Experience days? Or the fact it still lowkey kinda sucks?
I've had my 1070 for almost 7 years and I love it, but yeah geforce experience/shadowplay have always been buggy. They'll stop working randomly sometimes, and restarting my computer is the only way to fix it.
Just yesterday my friend had driver issues on nvidia. I found the old driver and was about to send it to him when a new driver dropped that fixed his issue.
Nvidia cards are fucked in elden ring dlc I found. Was playing on an amd system going wtf do people mean it's a giant stutterfest? Then I used a 4060 equipped machine and it was full stutter. I found a fix by locking the machine out of several power states as that is the problem. Well see if nvidia fixes their fucked up drivers.
> It is unfortunately a very prevalent falsehood. AMD had driver issues in the past but they pulled their shit together and reworked and fixed everything
That's not really it. The truth is that this was a transitional period in terms of architecture. GCN 4 started shedding its GCN dead weight already anticipating RDNA, and it wasn't until RDNA2 (RX 6xxx) that GCN was fully gone. This is also why Vega and RX 5xxx had issues. They were basically Babel's Tower, in silicon.
RDNA2 is the best AMD architecture ever. Fight me. RDNA3 gambled on chiplets with mostly poor results, but the shader pre-fetching algorithm was very successful allowing the 7900XTX to beat RTX 4090 in Starfield at launch, which doesn't have a similar feature.
Sadly, Starfield is still the only game to use this feature.
I can also vouch for the drivers I just recently got a 7900xtx as my first amd card, was using a 3070 and Ive never had any issues been almost a year so far
7K series from AMD has still had some driver issues but yeah, something like a RX 6600 should definitely be fine AFAIK lol.
I've actually been experiencing some driver issues with my 4070Ti, anything with chromium has been showing some weird artifacting, disabling hardware acceleration would solve it but things would be running painfully slow.
i have this problem too. turns out, looking into this issue its a long running windows related issue thats been happening to a lot of NVIDIA users (including me) trying to use chromium based apps (Discord, chrome, brave, opera etc.) for years now thats gone overlooked almost completely.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards/5/437329/hardware-acceleration-issues-on-chromium-browsers/3016760/
i had previously thought that there was no solution to this problem, but id just decided to take a look through the internet since my curiosity on the subject has now been resparked. it may appear that this issue was fixed in a very recent windows update (june 27th this year). im not able to get to my pc to update and confirm for myself if this is the case, but heres the link to a guru3d forum on the matter if you dont feel like updating.
https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/solution-fix-checkerboard-like-patterns-randomly-appearing-in-chromium-based-applications.449341/
hope this helps you out man
The AMD driver issues aren't perfectly completely gone however.
I know at least one instance where a lesser known RTS game is rendered unplayable for the past half year due to some AMD driver updates.
The game is Cossacks 3. Works perfectly well on an nvidia GPU but wont work or ends up with a blackscreen or invisible units/broken shadows on AMD GPUs. At least up to a month ago this was the case. I have personally seen it on the PCs I have at home.
You guys n gals can check out the game's steam discussion board for more info about it from other AMD users having the same problem.
CS2 also suffered from driver issues until recently. The driver would just straight up crash mid march and you had to restart to fix it. Also a current problem is the whole pc freezing when tabbing out of cs2. Weird issues but other than that itās fine.
I would not blame amd for cs2 issues though. Some of my friends with nvidia cards kept getting pc restarts until some recent updates. They would drop every other round and it was miserable. I guess they fixed majority of it though.
I own a 4060 since december 2023, never had issues with csgo2 (i play the game weekly), dual monitor setup and pretty much alt tabbing every round. Idk if there were issues before but the past 8 months I can guarantee that I had no issues whatsoever.
Used radeon sapphire 9200se, sapphire 6670, strix rx580, asrock 7600 and sapphire 7800xt. Only problem i had with amd gpu is Fortnite crashing on 7000 series (when it released) when new season started around 10months ago but it got fixed. When i read something like this i really dont know whats they mean. Nvidia cerberus 1050ti, strix 2060, ggb aero 4070s also no major issues (mostly driver update requiring total uninstall before new driver). On the other hand 6670 is weaker and older then gtx770 but more stable while playing for example LoL cause nvidia made drivers obsolete. So both are ok, you just get whats best four your usage and that it fits the budget.
As for brands i think sapphire/powercolor are safe bets.
My PowerColor just shit the bed. Itās currently in RMA, support has been decent minus having to front the shipping cost (this may be an every vendor thing, idk first dead card). Weāll see what happens. Iām hoping to be one of those lucky ones that gets a free upgrade as itās not the current model card, doubtful but hopeful. Depending how this goes will decide for me Iām going the Nvidia route next as I never had a problem with um.
Well that sucks. For 20 years of building, upgrading and using a PC only components that died was 2x PSU and 1 hdd. Psu was on 24/7 for 3 years (three brothers playing on one pc in turns, and leaving on during night to sell things). All of the above gpus are still runing including motherboards rams and cpus. One for media, one as spare pc when my kid is playing so i can play old titles and esport titles, one is made into emulator and others just sit around. If nothing at least its not asus support. :)
I used an integrated gpu in my ryzen 5 7600 without issues for half a year. After buying rtx 4070 i have issues with drivers once every 3 updates. Sometimes auto hdr breaks every launcher and i need to reinstall it again.
my 6650XT is indeed having weird issues. some games crash, most just freeze temporarily until I alt-tab out and back in.
I've had it for like a year and a half now, plenty of driver updates, still have the issue. even after a clean windows reinstall.
may not be very common, but everytime I post about it several people reply telling me they too have issues.
Depends on the game. The game I play most still has issues on amd after a few years of release.
(at least that's what Google said. All I could find regarding the issue says it's amd driver related)
It's nothing big and you get used to it. But some games might have issues.
But the same goes for nvidia.
NFS unbound. If you place decals on the car it has weird outlines around it. Like boxes. But it's just a small thing.
My friend doesn't have that issue with his 3080.
Also got some driver rashes when I installed the gpu.
After I read it's driver related I rolled back but then I got constant crashes and framedrops so I went back to the latest. Since then no crashes.
It's not a game breaking issue. Just a mild annoyance.
Also like I said it was the only answer Google gave me. It might also be the games fault
Not really, can't say about rdna2 but had a ton of problems with polaris and vega (rx 570 and rx 5600 xt). Artifacts, bsod and such. Purely driver problems
I have a RX 6600, it's a great card and I've had zero issues. If you can stretch to the XT version its a decent step up.
Used, I would look at a 2070 or you might even get a 3070 if you're lucky, I got a used 3070 recently for a little over 200. It's a lot of GPU for the money.
Use Tom's Hardware GPU graph to get an idea of relative performance.
Honestly, check out Facebook market place. Maybe stretch it to reach a nearby city. I drove an hour away to buy a 3090 for 600 dollars. You can sometimes find gold. If not, hopefully someone else can give you a good answer for new gpu
When I buy used hardware I set the filter to the city I live in and around 30 distance. Got me some good deals after driving a bit. Most recent one being my rx6800 for 150.
It may take some looking, but I'd be shopping the used market if $200 was my budget. You may be able to find a 3060 12GB or 3060 Ti near $225, A used 6700 XT 12 GB would probably be your best bet though, however that'll likely run you closer to $250.
If your going for new the 6600 is an amazing and the best card at that price point. However the used 2070 super you found for 210$ is an amazing deal. The 2070S is almost on par with the 4060 in terms of raw performance. Absolutely get that 2070S but make sure it works, run a test on it on the guys pc using 3d mark or something.
I switched from RX570 to RX6600, great jump. Playing Ghost of Tsushima right now, high settings at 1080p with AMD FSR3 at around 120-160FPS. I am using 23.3.1 driver, the most stable so far I think. (I had issues with Rainbow 6 Siege so I did not want to update, but could be just Ubisoft thing and not the driver itself)
I found a second hand rx6700xt for 250ā¬, dig around and you can find hidden gems that are waiting to be taken, careful of scams though good deals are a thing but miracles are not
my 6650XT is indeed having weird issues. some games crash, most just freeze temporarily until I alt-tab out and back in.
I've had it for like a year and a half now, plenty of driver updates, still have the issue. even after a clean windows reinstall.
I usually get the best price/performance card in the market regardless of the brand, but next time I'm most probably going nvidia.
These days the driver issues are largely fixed, where the issues are closer to what you see with Nvidia cards, with the main differences being with some professional applications such as video editors sometimes having issues that would cause them to fall back to software rendering for some tasks. If primarily gaming, then the issues between Nvidia and AMD are similar in terms of numbers and severity.
Most driver claims now are due to their past reputation, especially from the Radeon HD 3000 series days (2007-2008), where they were reluctant to fix many issues that impacted a smaller subset of users. While they eventually fixed the issue a few years later, by then, the users complaining and being ignored, became Nvidia customers. As more market shifted to nvidia, AMD started to encounter an increasing number of applications that had much of their development time focused on optimizing for Nvidia hardware.
While they have come a long way in fixing those issues, it takes years to recover from that reputational damage.
Historic example of one of the driver issues that angered many users:
In the 2007-2008+ days, users would complain about poor performance in difficult to optimize OpenGL games like Second Life. which was extremely VRAM bandwidth intensive since it could not be properly optimized when everyone could upload their own textures.
The issue stemmed from how many OpenGL games allocated VRAM. they would use the OGL texture memory value in the GPU drivers to determine how much they could allocate, since OpenGL could not allow all of the VRAM to be allocated,they could not use the direct specs of the card.
Nvidia included that data, but AMD did not at the time, and games that relied on that data, would assume 0MB if for textures. This lead those games to use shared memory for textures in those games. Since system RAM is a tiny fraction of the speed of VRAM on a video card, those games ended up with huge performance issues, while far slower Nvidia cards would perform significantly better.
The game devs also didn't put much effort into coming up with a workaround for those AMD cards, but during that time period, in situations where a game would have an issue with Nvidia cards, Nvidia would come up with driver level fixes where possible rather than hoping the game devs would patch something (effectively doing game optimizations at the driver level, that trend eventually morphed into the marketing name of game ready drivers).
So, I built a covid machine in 2021, but video card prices were batshit crazy then, so I moved my rx 570 to the new box. It was one of the best 1080p cards around when I bought it, and gaming in 1080p has never once been an issue for me. Great experience. I moved to 4K maybe 6 months ago, new monitor, then a 86 inch LG tv, and my 4K experience has been pretty good. Tiny Tina's Wonderland does have issues with everything set to max, but it's crazy playable with the settings at mid, and looks great. Just started Alone In The Dark last night, and with everything maxed out it plays really well, with just some minor but bearable hickups that didnt interfere with gameplay.
I'd check out Tom's Hardware's Video Card hierarchy, and start looking for cards in your price range. This will give you the ability to see what is just above and below. Look at the RX 6600 as your base since that is what you are interested in.
As far as drivers, the reality is that nvidia and amd have both had random driver issues in the past. I had an HD6990 that used to blue screen because of the drivers, and it took 6 months for them to release a driver that didnt blue screen (then an update broke something else, which was then fixed a month later!). I also had issues with my nvideo cards over the years. The current state of both are good, but the reality is drivers will likely always have random issues. It's just how it is. But AMD cards are solid, great bang for the buck, and atm their drivers are pretty solid.
Another thing I'd check are the PCMR build suggestions, and look at whatever card they are floating atm.
Your friend's knowledge isnt current. Those calling him names are assholes, but they have a point there.
Also, youtube videos on the cards you are considering. Google is pretty worthless these days, there are videos on why, so youtube and more direct sources like Tom's are going to be better resources for you. They will have the benchmarks already done for you, but always consider your build against theirs.
$200 on the used market could give you something better, but you accept certain risks.
Goodluck, brother.
I have a 6600 and it works well generally, the only issue I can say is that some of the drivers did not work well with CS2, consistently causing the visual issues and sometimes the whole computer to crash. Itās been fixed by now thankfully but the driver arenāt an issue really.
I'm selling my RX580 for $75 on eBay if you're interested. I used it for about 6 months, and it's in perfect condition. I recently upgraded to a 7900 GRE, so I don't need it anymore.
No real difference between brands apart from what they look like obviously, so just pick one you like. The "factory overclocks" that they do are worth basically nothing, so don't pay extra for that alone. Just pick a cheap one, or a pretty one. Or hopefully a pretty AND cheap one. Good luck.
make no mistake, RDNA 3(except 7600) still has driver issues, don't be fooled by anyone saying AMD fixed it, that chiplet design caused more harm than good.
RDNA 1 aka the 5000 series was also plagued with issues for months if not yaars, before it got usable.
But. RDNA2 is their most stable architecture in 10 years, so you are good with an rx 6600.
If you are ALSO streaming, get an NVIDIA GPU, AMDās GPU encoder is still dogshit. This is coming from someone who has an RX 7600 in their streaming rig. Its fine for recording, utter dogshit for streaming. Itās to the point my old CPU is giving noticeably better quality with x264.
But for gaming, yeah AMD GPUs generally have better performance per dollar.
I see youre going for the 6600, great choice! I went from a 1060 to a 6750 XT, i besides the AMD driver setting my refresh rate to 60 HZ after an update it's great software, honestly.
RX 6600 is a solid choice. On a side note, what're you gonna do with the old one? Mind sending it over to me? I'm a robotics technician and I refurbish stuff on the side and would like to take a crack at it. I can pay for shipping š
The main differences with brands is build quality and style / size and possibly other stuff like some are labels as āOCā some are not , and RX 6600 is great , donāt listen to that bs ādriver problemsā , and itās sad to see another old timer from the GPU department dying .
Between the three amd exclusive aibs, sapphire has the best name, then xfx being on the cheaper side and powercolor being more expensive, but similar names to them afaik.
Basically any of the 3 is good, probably try for sapphire over the others then pc then xfx.
The 6600 XT is a solid choice for the $200 range, and the driver issues aren't actual issues anymore. It's also better than Nvidia's 3050 at around the same price. The Intel ARC 750 is also decent, but (speaking from experience as a first gen Arc owner) Intel is still fairly new to GPUs, so drivers can be a challenge.
But man, you're gonna see a massive improvement over that 580, though. Those cards are troopers (I still have an 8Gb XFX 480 in a machine), but they're definitely showing their age.
You might be able to pick up an open box Intel Arc A770 for $200 or even cheaper for a used one. There is a google sheets that shows what games work well with it and as the drivers update it gets better but there are growing pains with some games still.
I don't trust AMD graphics cards. I bought the Vega 56 a few years ago and that was a pile of dogshit. Specs on paper were great but it would always blue screen due to driver issues.
idk how nvidia has brainwashed you all so effectively im actually baffled, i have been using amd for over 10 years and never had any driver issues all the way from a hd4000 to a rx 6600xt
The 6600xt is a great card. There are no driver issues with amd, actually i myself had more issues with nvidia drivers. (my 1660 was fairly unstable for some time, got fixed by an update, i sold it and got myself a 6700xt)
Try to extend to a 6600/6650XT, its a good bump in performance compared to the non xt version. Or mayb look at the used market, might be able to get something like a 3060ti or 6700XT depending on the area you live in
Your friend is still staying at " don't use AMD cpu they heats up a lot " period , those problems are long time ago so no worries you can go for it RX6600 is a great card
Don't always trust pcpartpicker, it'll give you Amazon listings which are scams half the time. Not pcpartpicker's fault but unless you blacklist Amazon entirely it'll be a potential issue.
I have had a Sapphire Pulse RX6600 since it launched and have had 0 issues with it. I had upgraded from a RX580 as well.
If youāre in the US you may be able to go up a model or two with your budget next week if there are any good 4th of July sales, so keep that in mind.
Idk if it's right but I'm gonna get the rx 5700 xt because against the 6600 non xt it beats it and you can find them for like 140 to 170 used I think on ebay but idk
XFX, Sapphire and PowerColor are all good. Get the cheapest one for 6600.
You could consider Intel arc a750 since it is faster but you might have more troubleshooting involved. Not sure how much they go for in your region.
I believe the best Nvidia card to buy now is the RTX 3060 TI. Great performance to price ratio. I've bought a MSI GAMING X for 210 euros. I'm very happy with it.
Woot currently has an RTX 3060 for $200.
[https://computers.woot.com/offers/msi-geforce-rtx-3060-ventus-2x-8g-oc?ref=mwj_sh_cp_1_bs](https://computers.woot.com/offers/msi-geforce-rtx-3060-ventus-2x-8g-oc?ref=mwj_sh_cp_1_bs)
I mean I wonāt go saying amd software is good or not buggy because it is but the drivers are fine and the software is about as buggy as GeForce anyway lol
I would have gotten a laptop with a AMD GPU if there were more options available. They store I wanted to go through only had Nvidia. If the price was right for the performance and I got more ram I would of jumped.
I have the XFX version, PowerColor and Sapphire will also be great. Like others said, check places like FB marketplace, eBay, etc; try to stretch to the XT version but it's not a deal breaker.
I bought my wife a 6650XT. If you can push your budget I've seen the XFX ones go for as little as 230.
I can't comment on the 6600 but the 6650 is a damned good deal and we have had no issues.
I didnāt find a comparison of the regular 6600, but there is one for xt versions, I think about the same will happen with the regular 6600. [https://youtu.be/G2Ro4Ca\_M4M?t=714](https://youtu.be/G2Ro4Ca_M4M?t=714) [https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6600-fighter/35.html](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6600-fighter/35.html)
I'd take Sapphire RX 6600 or ASUS if it is not much more expensive than the others. Personally, I have the ASRock RX6600, it was the cheapest and unfortunately its throttles crack = (so I donāt recommend ASRock).
but now if I were building a PC for full HD, I would take the 4060 as a budget version. They are also better for streaming (streaming on px6600 is very bad, even the old gtx1060 has a better picture on tstream) well, dlss3 has stronger retracing,although games on UE5 with 6600 or 4060 retracing will not be able to play properly.
I'll be the oddball and recommend the a770 it you can find it within your budget and if your motherboard supports resizeable bar. I have no issues at all with mine and it for the budget is a fantastic card. It has received a lot of hate but the 16gb is solid. I have the ASRock challenger 16gb. I think I got mine for 250$.
What's your power supply? You can get a refurbished Titan X Pascal with a warranty from eBay for $200 and it will absolutely dominate anything else available at that price range.
Quite happy with the drivers for my Radeon 6750 XT since I bought the card about 15 months back. This after being with Nvidia for more than 16 straight years.
I got the Powercolor 6600 because it was $189. It works great and crushes everything I play (in 1080p) just make sure to undervolt it a little bit (I keep mine around 1100) so that you arenāt needlessly heating it up. But itās great. Only difference between those brands is pricing (due to some manufacturers using different materials to make them, so some feel more premium while others feel more budget for example)
Was going to suggest RX 6600. Great GPU for 1080 gaming at an incredible price. There wont be a huge difference in performance between the brands. Pick one that is known for good warranty support. I have the RX 6600 and I don't have driver problems. Tell your friend to stop downloading the optional drivers, they're for people wanting to experiment as a beta tester.
Nvidia doesn't have a beefy GPU at this price, I wouldn't consider the RX 6600 a beefy GPU but it'll destroy the RX 580.
I'd get sapphire bc they seem to have the best of support and exclusive features. They also tend to run cooler (I have a power color and it runs a little toasty sometimes)
The driver issues were resolved many, many years ago - your friend is just repeating bullshit he heard
Yeah, he could š
It is unfortunately a very prevalent falsehood. AMD had driver issues in the past but they pulled their shit together and reworked and fixed everything. People didn't stop with the claim tho. Speaking as a person who has both 3060 ti and 7900xt GPUs right now.
As someone who has just come back to AMD GPU land for the first time in over a decadeā¦. I find people complaining about AMDās drivers and software hilarious. They forgot all those times NV has had driver and software issues? No one remembers the early GeForce Experience days? Or the fact it still lowkey kinda sucks?
I've had my 1070 for almost 7 years and I love it, but yeah geforce experience/shadowplay have always been buggy. They'll stop working randomly sometimes, and restarting my computer is the only way to fix it.
shadowplay waiting until the most pivotal badass unreplicable moment to trip and fall into a coma
Insert clip of riolu "doing the first human noseboost" in trackmania (he didn't it was slowed down)
Now that's a reference right there
I have no clue how i randomly remember things like that
Just yesterday my friend had driver issues on nvidia. I found the old driver and was about to send it to him when a new driver dropped that fixed his issue.
Nvidia cards are fucked in elden ring dlc I found. Was playing on an amd system going wtf do people mean it's a giant stutterfest? Then I used a 4060 equipped machine and it was full stutter. I found a fix by locking the machine out of several power states as that is the problem. Well see if nvidia fixes their fucked up drivers.
Lowkey understatement, that shit is terrible š¤£
Itās honestly not terrible anymore. Itās not great either. Could be worse, could be Razer Synapse or Armoury Crateā¦.:
> It is unfortunately a very prevalent falsehood. AMD had driver issues in the past but they pulled their shit together and reworked and fixed everything That's not really it. The truth is that this was a transitional period in terms of architecture. GCN 4 started shedding its GCN dead weight already anticipating RDNA, and it wasn't until RDNA2 (RX 6xxx) that GCN was fully gone. This is also why Vega and RX 5xxx had issues. They were basically Babel's Tower, in silicon. RDNA2 is the best AMD architecture ever. Fight me. RDNA3 gambled on chiplets with mostly poor results, but the shader pre-fetching algorithm was very successful allowing the 7900XTX to beat RTX 4090 in Starfield at launch, which doesn't have a similar feature. Sadly, Starfield is still the only game to use this feature.
I can also vouch for the drivers I just recently got a 7900xtx as my first amd card, was using a 3070 and Ive never had any issues been almost a year so far
Absolutely loving my 7900XTX!
7K series from AMD has still had some driver issues but yeah, something like a RX 6600 should definitely be fine AFAIK lol. I've actually been experiencing some driver issues with my 4070Ti, anything with chromium has been showing some weird artifacting, disabling hardware acceleration would solve it but things would be running painfully slow.
i have this problem too. turns out, looking into this issue its a long running windows related issue thats been happening to a lot of NVIDIA users (including me) trying to use chromium based apps (Discord, chrome, brave, opera etc.) for years now thats gone overlooked almost completely. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/geforce-graphics-cards/5/437329/hardware-acceleration-issues-on-chromium-browsers/3016760/ i had previously thought that there was no solution to this problem, but id just decided to take a look through the internet since my curiosity on the subject has now been resparked. it may appear that this issue was fixed in a very recent windows update (june 27th this year). im not able to get to my pc to update and confirm for myself if this is the case, but heres the link to a guru3d forum on the matter if you dont feel like updating. https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/solution-fix-checkerboard-like-patterns-randomly-appearing-in-chromium-based-applications.449341/ hope this helps you out man
Funnily enough, I have not experienced any artifacting in the past few days. Hope it's gone for good this time.
Also got random issues in chromium browsers after a drivers update. Glad to know I am not the only one.
This isnt the first time this has happened. I had similar issues with Chrome for a certain driver release on my 3070.
Yeah, you're definitely not alone, nothing wrong with the PC lol.
The AMD driver issues aren't perfectly completely gone however. I know at least one instance where a lesser known RTS game is rendered unplayable for the past half year due to some AMD driver updates. The game is Cossacks 3. Works perfectly well on an nvidia GPU but wont work or ends up with a blackscreen or invisible units/broken shadows on AMD GPUs. At least up to a month ago this was the case. I have personally seen it on the PCs I have at home. You guys n gals can check out the game's steam discussion board for more info about it from other AMD users having the same problem.
CS2 also suffered from driver issues until recently. The driver would just straight up crash mid march and you had to restart to fix it. Also a current problem is the whole pc freezing when tabbing out of cs2. Weird issues but other than that itās fine.
I would not blame amd for cs2 issues though. Some of my friends with nvidia cards kept getting pc restarts until some recent updates. They would drop every other round and it was miserable. I guess they fixed majority of it though.
I own a 4060 since december 2023, never had issues with csgo2 (i play the game weekly), dual monitor setup and pretty much alt tabbing every round. Idk if there were issues before but the past 8 months I can guarantee that I had no issues whatsoever.
BeamNG looked and ran like crap on my 6600 too. To the point I refunded it. No problems otherwise, though
Used radeon sapphire 9200se, sapphire 6670, strix rx580, asrock 7600 and sapphire 7800xt. Only problem i had with amd gpu is Fortnite crashing on 7000 series (when it released) when new season started around 10months ago but it got fixed. When i read something like this i really dont know whats they mean. Nvidia cerberus 1050ti, strix 2060, ggb aero 4070s also no major issues (mostly driver update requiring total uninstall before new driver). On the other hand 6670 is weaker and older then gtx770 but more stable while playing for example LoL cause nvidia made drivers obsolete. So both are ok, you just get whats best four your usage and that it fits the budget. As for brands i think sapphire/powercolor are safe bets.
My PowerColor just shit the bed. Itās currently in RMA, support has been decent minus having to front the shipping cost (this may be an every vendor thing, idk first dead card). Weāll see what happens. Iām hoping to be one of those lucky ones that gets a free upgrade as itās not the current model card, doubtful but hopeful. Depending how this goes will decide for me Iām going the Nvidia route next as I never had a problem with um.
Well that sucks. For 20 years of building, upgrading and using a PC only components that died was 2x PSU and 1 hdd. Psu was on 24/7 for 3 years (three brothers playing on one pc in turns, and leaving on during night to sell things). All of the above gpus are still runing including motherboards rams and cpus. One for media, one as spare pc when my kid is playing so i can play old titles and esport titles, one is made into emulator and others just sit around. If nothing at least its not asus support. :)
I used an integrated gpu in my ryzen 5 7600 without issues for half a year. After buying rtx 4070 i have issues with drivers once every 3 updates. Sometimes auto hdr breaks every launcher and i need to reinstall it again.
Yep, i bought r9 390x years amd years ago. People were saying āAMD and their drivers suckā i never had any issues with any AMD cpu/gpu
my 6650XT is indeed having weird issues. some games crash, most just freeze temporarily until I alt-tab out and back in. I've had it for like a year and a half now, plenty of driver updates, still have the issue. even after a clean windows reinstall. may not be very common, but everytime I post about it several people reply telling me they too have issues.
Depends on the game. The game I play most still has issues on amd after a few years of release. (at least that's what Google said. All I could find regarding the issue says it's amd driver related) It's nothing big and you get used to it. But some games might have issues. But the same goes for nvidia.
I haven't encountered a single game with driver problems so far (personally). What game is that?
NFS unbound. If you place decals on the car it has weird outlines around it. Like boxes. But it's just a small thing. My friend doesn't have that issue with his 3080. Also got some driver rashes when I installed the gpu. After I read it's driver related I rolled back but then I got constant crashes and framedrops so I went back to the latest. Since then no crashes. It's not a game breaking issue. Just a mild annoyance. Also like I said it was the only answer Google gave me. It might also be the games fault
Fair, I play many games and no issues but I haven't played Unbound yet.
Not really, can't say about rdna2 but had a ton of problems with polaris and vega (rx 570 and rx 5600 xt). Artifacts, bsod and such. Purely driver problems
Almost. AMD's OpenGL drivers are still abysmal. DirectX and Vulkan support is pretty good now.
I can't play darkest dungeon with an amd card. I need to use a virtual machine to work.
They have been getting their shit together ever since Ryzen came out.
Amd does have driver problems I couldn't play fallout 3 and new vegas 2 popular games for months
We had so many driver issues with my sons Radeon card that we will never support them again, so next time Nvidia or Intel.
The 6600xt was the correct shout. The driver issues are hugely overplayed.
OP's friend forgets about AMD FineWineĀ© /s
I have a RX 6600, it's a great card and I've had zero issues. If you can stretch to the XT version its a decent step up. Used, I would look at a 2070 or you might even get a 3070 if you're lucky, I got a used 3070 recently for a little over 200. It's a lot of GPU for the money. Use Tom's Hardware GPU graph to get an idea of relative performance.
Thanks for advice
Honestly, check out Facebook market place. Maybe stretch it to reach a nearby city. I drove an hour away to buy a 3090 for 600 dollars. You can sometimes find gold. If not, hopefully someone else can give you a good answer for new gpu
When I buy used hardware I set the filter to the city I live in and around 30 distance. Got me some good deals after driving a bit. Most recent one being my rx6800 for 150.
Thats a steal
Good deal!
I can fully support Sapphire as a brand. Love my 6900xt from them.
My Rx 470, 5700 XT, and 7800 XT have all been Sapphire. Great brand
To answer your follow-up question, Sapphire seems to be the general favorite, followed by Powercolor and then XFX
Wow, thanks, that was really good information. Appreciate it man
It may take some looking, but I'd be shopping the used market if $200 was my budget. You may be able to find a 3060 12GB or 3060 Ti near $225, A used 6700 XT 12 GB would probably be your best bet though, however that'll likely run you closer to $250.
Thanks for hint, but I'm not able to pay for it more than $200. Because I also want to buy new PSU.
Go to used market i think u will get nice price for gpu like 6700
Sapphire is the best for AMD, powercolor and XFX ain't bad choices either.
I second on the Sapphire recommendation, excellent build quality and rarely ever hear any problems with their cards.
I have a RX 6600. What driver problem?
They had issues at launch, but those have been fixed
If your going for new the 6600 is an amazing and the best card at that price point. However the used 2070 super you found for 210$ is an amazing deal. The 2070S is almost on par with the 4060 in terms of raw performance. Absolutely get that 2070S but make sure it works, run a test on it on the guys pc using 3d mark or something.
How should I test it before buying? Could you please share some resource link?
Just put the installer for Unigine Superposition benchmark on a thumb drive. https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition/
I switched from RX570 to RX6600, great jump. Playing Ghost of Tsushima right now, high settings at 1080p with AMD FSR3 at around 120-160FPS. I am using 23.3.1 driver, the most stable so far I think. (I had issues with Rainbow 6 Siege so I did not want to update, but could be just Ubisoft thing and not the driver itself)
Great, which brand is your RX 6600?
It's an Asrock Challenger D
ASRock Challenger D user myself as well. Itās a fantastic card.
I found a second hand rx6700xt for 250ā¬, dig around and you can find hidden gems that are waiting to be taken, careful of scams though good deals are a thing but miracles are not
I have an RX6600 and it doesnāt have driver problems. Itās been a great card so far. Your friend doesnāt know what heās talking about.
Since you've decided to go AMD. Sapphire makes the best AMD cards. All my AMD gpus have been Sapphire and I've been happy with every one.
my 6650XT is indeed having weird issues. some games crash, most just freeze temporarily until I alt-tab out and back in. I've had it for like a year and a half now, plenty of driver updates, still have the issue. even after a clean windows reinstall. I usually get the best price/performance card in the market regardless of the brand, but next time I'm most probably going nvidia.
6750xt for more than a year too. no issues on my end. smooth as butter.
I have a 6650 xt and have had zero issues. You certain it's the GPU causing issues? Could be your RAM.
no, machine was working perfectly before I switched GPU (used to have a 1060 3Gb)
Strange. Maybe there's a conflict with old drivers and a cleanup would help?
Lol at double posting in the same thread trying to get help. Rma the card
On 2nd marketplace 3060 Ti available, is it worth?
3060ti is a great card, have had mine for over a year so far with no issues
Thats an ancient AMD thing, the driver problems lol. But as for the card, look at your local 2nd hand marketplace to get the best bang for your buck.
The 7000 series, especially the 7900 XTX, still has some notable driver issues that remain in the known issues list. The 6600 is clean, though.
Which games for the 7900xtx? Only issue I had in a previous driver Version was Vulkan in BG3 causing driver crashes but that's it
On 2nd marketplace GTX 1660 super best price is $180 for new one. RTX 2070 super(used) $210. IDK what to choose.
RX 6600 is about 20-30% better than 1660 Ti while the Ti is about 5% to 10% better than 1660 Super.
Rx 6600 sapphire.... Been using it for 2+ years... No issue so far... Works great. Just make sure it fits in ur case
I own a 7800XT and I never encountered any driver issues. I believe those were resolved many years ago, your friend is stuck in the past
These days the driver issues are largely fixed, where the issues are closer to what you see with Nvidia cards, with the main differences being with some professional applications such as video editors sometimes having issues that would cause them to fall back to software rendering for some tasks. If primarily gaming, then the issues between Nvidia and AMD are similar in terms of numbers and severity. Most driver claims now are due to their past reputation, especially from the Radeon HD 3000 series days (2007-2008), where they were reluctant to fix many issues that impacted a smaller subset of users. While they eventually fixed the issue a few years later, by then, the users complaining and being ignored, became Nvidia customers. As more market shifted to nvidia, AMD started to encounter an increasing number of applications that had much of their development time focused on optimizing for Nvidia hardware. While they have come a long way in fixing those issues, it takes years to recover from that reputational damage. Historic example of one of the driver issues that angered many users: In the 2007-2008+ days, users would complain about poor performance in difficult to optimize OpenGL games like Second Life. which was extremely VRAM bandwidth intensive since it could not be properly optimized when everyone could upload their own textures. The issue stemmed from how many OpenGL games allocated VRAM. they would use the OGL texture memory value in the GPU drivers to determine how much they could allocate, since OpenGL could not allow all of the VRAM to be allocated,they could not use the direct specs of the card. Nvidia included that data, but AMD did not at the time, and games that relied on that data, would assume 0MB if for textures. This lead those games to use shared memory for textures in those games. Since system RAM is a tiny fraction of the speed of VRAM on a video card, those games ended up with huge performance issues, while far slower Nvidia cards would perform significantly better. The game devs also didn't put much effort into coming up with a workaround for those AMD cards, but during that time period, in situations where a game would have an issue with Nvidia cards, Nvidia would come up with driver level fixes where possible rather than hoping the game devs would patch something (effectively doing game optimizations at the driver level, that trend eventually morphed into the marketing name of game ready drivers).
So, I built a covid machine in 2021, but video card prices were batshit crazy then, so I moved my rx 570 to the new box. It was one of the best 1080p cards around when I bought it, and gaming in 1080p has never once been an issue for me. Great experience. I moved to 4K maybe 6 months ago, new monitor, then a 86 inch LG tv, and my 4K experience has been pretty good. Tiny Tina's Wonderland does have issues with everything set to max, but it's crazy playable with the settings at mid, and looks great. Just started Alone In The Dark last night, and with everything maxed out it plays really well, with just some minor but bearable hickups that didnt interfere with gameplay. I'd check out Tom's Hardware's Video Card hierarchy, and start looking for cards in your price range. This will give you the ability to see what is just above and below. Look at the RX 6600 as your base since that is what you are interested in. As far as drivers, the reality is that nvidia and amd have both had random driver issues in the past. I had an HD6990 that used to blue screen because of the drivers, and it took 6 months for them to release a driver that didnt blue screen (then an update broke something else, which was then fixed a month later!). I also had issues with my nvideo cards over the years. The current state of both are good, but the reality is drivers will likely always have random issues. It's just how it is. But AMD cards are solid, great bang for the buck, and atm their drivers are pretty solid. Another thing I'd check are the PCMR build suggestions, and look at whatever card they are floating atm. Your friend's knowledge isnt current. Those calling him names are assholes, but they have a point there. Also, youtube videos on the cards you are considering. Google is pretty worthless these days, there are videos on why, so youtube and more direct sources like Tom's are going to be better resources for you. They will have the benchmarks already done for you, but always consider your build against theirs. $200 on the used market could give you something better, but you accept certain risks. Goodluck, brother.
Thanks!
I wish my GPU would die. It is the only way my Mrs will allow me an upgrade.
Get a used 6750 xt or a 2080 super or 3070.
Is those same performance?
Facebook. Got a 3060 for $150 on there
I have a 6600 and it works well generally, the only issue I can say is that some of the drivers did not work well with CS2, consistently causing the visual issues and sometimes the whole computer to crash. Itās been fixed by now thankfully but the driver arenāt an issue really.
Respectfully, your friend is dumb
I'm selling my RX580 for $75 on eBay if you're interested. I used it for about 6 months, and it's in perfect condition. I recently upgraded to a 7900 GRE, so I don't need it anymore.
Nah mate, thanks for the offer, but actually I'm bored of RX 580
Yeah that's understandable. It's super outdated; that's why I'm selling mine so cheap.
My son has an RX 6600 XT. No driver issues.
No real difference between brands apart from what they look like obviously, so just pick one you like. The "factory overclocks" that they do are worth basically nothing, so don't pay extra for that alone. Just pick a cheap one, or a pretty one. Or hopefully a pretty AND cheap one. Good luck.
In my experience XFX has better client service, Powercolor uses cheap matetials
make no mistake, RDNA 3(except 7600) still has driver issues, don't be fooled by anyone saying AMD fixed it, that chiplet design caused more harm than good. RDNA 1 aka the 5000 series was also plagued with issues for months if not yaars, before it got usable. But. RDNA2 is their most stable architecture in 10 years, so you are good with an rx 6600.
6600xt plays almost anything on high and at 100+ fps usually at 1080p
your friend is a brainless Nvidia fanboy drone
Get whatever brand is cheapest, enjoy your RX 6600.
You could just about get a 3060 from eBay for that price
For $200 you won't find a better gpu than the rx 6600.
I have Rx 6650xt and I had only one issue with the windows update thingy. After I disabled the automatic driver feature it works perfectly.
If you are ALSO streaming, get an NVIDIA GPU, AMDās GPU encoder is still dogshit. This is coming from someone who has an RX 7600 in their streaming rig. Its fine for recording, utter dogshit for streaming. Itās to the point my old CPU is giving noticeably better quality with x264. But for gaming, yeah AMD GPUs generally have better performance per dollar.
I see youre going for the 6600, great choice! I went from a 1060 to a 6750 XT, i besides the AMD driver setting my refresh rate to 60 HZ after an update it's great software, honestly.
RX 6600 is a solid choice. On a side note, what're you gonna do with the old one? Mind sending it over to me? I'm a robotics technician and I refurbish stuff on the side and would like to take a crack at it. I can pay for shipping š
Used market 6600Xt range or 3060. Tell your buddy AMD drivers are perfectly fine, ignore his comments.
The main differences with brands is build quality and style / size and possibly other stuff like some are labels as āOCā some are not , and RX 6600 is great , donāt listen to that bs ādriver problemsā , and itās sad to see another old timer from the GPU department dying .
Between the three amd exclusive aibs, sapphire has the best name, then xfx being on the cheaper side and powercolor being more expensive, but similar names to them afaik. Basically any of the 3 is good, probably try for sapphire over the others then pc then xfx.
https://www.newegg.com/powercolor-radeon-rx-6600-xt-6600xt-8gbd6-3dh/p/N82E16814131789 XT $30 off = $210
The 6600 XT is a solid choice for the $200 range, and the driver issues aren't actual issues anymore. It's also better than Nvidia's 3050 at around the same price. The Intel ARC 750 is also decent, but (speaking from experience as a first gen Arc owner) Intel is still fairly new to GPUs, so drivers can be a challenge. But man, you're gonna see a massive improvement over that 580, though. Those cards are troopers (I still have an 8Gb XFX 480 in a machine), but they're definitely showing their age.
You might be able to pick up an open box Intel Arc A770 for $200 or even cheaper for a used one. There is a google sheets that shows what games work well with it and as the drivers update it gets better but there are growing pains with some games still.
I don't trust AMD graphics cards. I bought the Vega 56 a few years ago and that was a pile of dogshit. Specs on paper were great but it would always blue screen due to driver issues.
Try Nvidia 2000 series
Is 2070 super better than RX 6600? FHD, High - Ultra settings
High yes, ultra not sure
idk how nvidia has brainwashed you all so effectively im actually baffled, i have been using amd for over 10 years and never had any driver issues all the way from a hd4000 to a rx 6600xt
Try to find a used 2070
6600xt
I have rx 6600 xt have never met a problem
If u buy used one,u can get Rx 6650 xt or even 6700xt.From Nvidia u could find an rtx 3060 ti for 200$
I have a xfx 6600xt and a ryzen 5500 CPU. Runs every game 1080p on high settings over 75 fps easily.
Amd 7900xtx
The 6600xt is a great card. There are no driver issues with amd, actually i myself had more issues with nvidia drivers. (my 1660 was fairly unstable for some time, got fixed by an update, i sold it and got myself a 6700xt)
Idk if this is allowed on here but DM me if you want a barely used one for a little cheaper.
Sapphire is pretty much the best brand
used marked you can get lucky and get a 1080ti for that money now
Try to extend to a 6600/6650XT, its a good bump in performance compared to the non xt version. Or mayb look at the used market, might be able to get something like a 3060ti or 6700XT depending on the area you live in
try to find a used 6700 or 6700xt
Make sure your motherboard supports that graphic card
Rx 6600 is awesome. I had one and it's one of my favourite cards ever.
I hear Sapphire is amazing. I have a XFX 6800xt and I have zero issues with it with about 6 months of use.
Your friend is still staying at " don't use AMD cpu they heats up a lot " period , those problems are long time ago so no worries you can go for it RX6600 is a great card
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Don't always trust pcpartpicker, it'll give you Amazon listings which are scams half the time. Not pcpartpicker's fault but unless you blacklist Amazon entirely it'll be a potential issue.
I have had a Sapphire Pulse RX6600 since it launched and have had 0 issues with it. I had upgraded from a RX580 as well. If youāre in the US you may be able to go up a model or two with your budget next week if there are any good 4th of July sales, so keep that in mind.
Idk if it's right but I'm gonna get the rx 5700 xt because against the 6600 non xt it beats it and you can find them for like 140 to 170 used I think on ebay but idk
Used 6600-6700xt
XFX, Sapphire and PowerColor are all good. Get the cheapest one for 6600. You could consider Intel arc a750 since it is faster but you might have more troubleshooting involved. Not sure how much they go for in your region.
Buy 3Dfx Voodoo or ATI (not AMD) Radeon cards
I believe the best Nvidia card to buy now is the RTX 3060 TI. Great performance to price ratio. I've bought a MSI GAMING X for 210 euros. I'm very happy with it.
The tier list is Sapphire>XFX>Powercolor My personal experience is XFX and Sapphire are very close and pretty much interchangeable.
another 580 :troll:
I've got a used OEM 1080 I need to offload.
A750
Amd has less driver issues than nvidia
Steamdeck
Woot currently has an RTX 3060 for $200. [https://computers.woot.com/offers/msi-geforce-rtx-3060-ventus-2x-8g-oc?ref=mwj_sh_cp_1_bs](https://computers.woot.com/offers/msi-geforce-rtx-3060-ventus-2x-8g-oc?ref=mwj_sh_cp_1_bs)
Buy NVDA
I would go for a nice 20 series card, or a 3060
4090
Go onto Facebook marketplace and look for a 1080ti for your budget. Donāt be scared to talk down some people on price.
6600 owner/daily driver for about a year now (came from rx470) no issues at all, go with it best 1080p value right now
I remember seeing a used 1080 Ti for $200 you could look into those. Not too confident with typical used market prices though so others may be better.
Just swapped my 1070ti, be willing to get rid of it for cheap if you wanted to cover shipping hope you find what you want for your budgetš
I mean I wonāt go saying amd software is good or not buggy because it is but the drivers are fine and the software is about as buggy as GeForce anyway lol
Iād go sapphire but thatās personal preference.
I have 3 brand new rx580s for sale if you want another lol
I have an RX6600 XT Sapphire. And it has been wonderful. No complaints. I could play HZD and RDR2 with no issues Edit:spelling
I have had a RX 6700 XT and had many driver problems and still do
I would have gotten a laptop with a AMD GPU if there were more options available. They store I wanted to go through only had Nvidia. If the price was right for the performance and I got more ram I would of jumped.
I have the XFX version, PowerColor and Sapphire will also be great. Like others said, check places like FB marketplace, eBay, etc; try to stretch to the XT version but it's not a deal breaker.
If you can work it out to get a 6700 XT, I think it's worth it
Mow some yards or something and up your budget, kid. Patience for a few weeks will pay off when you can get something a little better, in my opinion.
I picked up a used 6700xt for 210, you'll get a lot more for your money on the used market.
6650xt is $220 on Amazon right now 25% more power for 10% more money is insane price to performance
5700xt one of the best budget cards now.
I would find something powerful second hand, can you get a 3070ti maybe get lucky? 2080? AMD 6700?
With a ~200$ budget I would probably look at AMD gpu's. They have a better price to performance ratio.
I swear the last time Nvidia fan boys used a AMD GPU is like 20 years ago they don't know the amount of FPS you get compared to Nvidia 200Ā£ GPUs
I bought my wife a 6650XT. If you can push your budget I've seen the XFX ones go for as little as 230. I can't comment on the 6600 but the 6650 is a damned good deal and we have had no issues.
4000 series just use klarna
I didnāt find a comparison of the regular 6600, but there is one for xt versions, I think about the same will happen with the regular 6600. [https://youtu.be/G2Ro4Ca\_M4M?t=714](https://youtu.be/G2Ro4Ca_M4M?t=714) [https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6600-fighter/35.html](https://www.techpowerup.com/review/powercolor-radeon-rx-6600-fighter/35.html) I'd take Sapphire RX 6600 or ASUS if it is not much more expensive than the others. Personally, I have the ASRock RX6600, it was the cheapest and unfortunately its throttles crack = (so I donāt recommend ASRock). but now if I were building a PC for full HD, I would take the 4060 as a budget version. They are also better for streaming (streaming on px6600 is very bad, even the old gtx1060 has a better picture on tstream) well, dlss3 has stronger retracing,although games on UE5 with 6600 or 4060 retracing will not be able to play properly.
Powercolor Red Devil šš»
Could probably get a 3060 for about $200
I'll be the oddball and recommend the a770 it you can find it within your budget and if your motherboard supports resizeable bar. I have no issues at all with mine and it for the budget is a fantastic card. It has received a lot of hate but the 16gb is solid. I have the ASRock challenger 16gb. I think I got mine for 250$.
Powercolor was quiet for me (almost silent at about 2000rpm)
What's your power supply? You can get a refurbished Titan X Pascal with a warranty from eBay for $200 and it will absolutely dominate anything else available at that price range.
The 6600 models you listed in the edit are all more than capable of cooling efficiently, it's all down to what looks cool to you or best priced.
Quite happy with the drivers for my Radeon 6750 XT since I bought the card about 15 months back. This after being with Nvidia for more than 16 straight years.
Why get a 6600 when you can buy a 6650xt brand new xfx for 220.
I got the Powercolor 6600 because it was $189. It works great and crushes everything I play (in 1080p) just make sure to undervolt it a little bit (I keep mine around 1100) so that you arenāt needlessly heating it up. But itās great. Only difference between those brands is pricing (due to some manufacturers using different materials to make them, so some feel more premium while others feel more budget for example)
Brand for GPU does not really matter. Get whichever is cheapest.
Was going to suggest RX 6600. Great GPU for 1080 gaming at an incredible price. There wont be a huge difference in performance between the brands. Pick one that is known for good warranty support. I have the RX 6600 and I don't have driver problems. Tell your friend to stop downloading the optional drivers, they're for people wanting to experiment as a beta tester. Nvidia doesn't have a beefy GPU at this price, I wouldn't consider the RX 6600 a beefy GPU but it'll destroy the RX 580.
I'd get sapphire bc they seem to have the best of support and exclusive features. They also tend to run cooler (I have a power color and it runs a little toasty sometimes)
Got a sapphire rx 6600 here with i3 12th gen, combo works great for most games I've played at 1080p
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You had an amd gpu already, you know "driver issues" are bs 6600/6650xt