AMD Radeon RX 5500M vs AMD Radeon RX 6600M

AMD Radeon RX 5500M

The AMD Radeon RX 5500M (or RX 5500 Mobile Graphics) is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 14 chip (RDNA architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 1,408 cores clocked at 1,645 MHz (max. Boost, 1448 MHz max game clock) and fast GDDR6 graphics memory (14 Gbps).

The Navi 14 chip uses the new RDNA (Radeon DNA) microarchitecture which is a successor the the GCN instruction set. It features a new processor design, a multi-level cache hierarchy and an improved rendering pipeline with support for GDDR6 memory.

The performance of the RX5500M should be between the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and the normal GeForce GTX 1660 Ti according to AMD. That means it should be best suited for Full HD (1920x1080) with high or maximum settings in demanding games. AMD states that the 5500M should be able to hit a performance of up to 4,6 TFLOPS (theoretical) versus 5,2 (+12%) of the desktop Radeon 5500. In our gaming benchmarks with the MSI Alpha 15, the RX 5500M however was slightly slower on average than the older GTX 1060 (mobile) and therefore between GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q.

The chip is specified with a TDP of 85 Watt and therefore 20 Watt more than the slower clocked Radeon RX5300M. In games the power consumption of the chip ranges between 64 and 105 Watt (Ghost Recon gameplay recorded with HWInfo64). In the MSI Alpha 15 the power consumption was clearly higher than the GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q and only slightly below a normal GTX 1660 Ti (measured in The Witcher 3 with an external monitor).

AMD Radeon RX 6600M

The AMD Radeon RX 6600M is a mobile mid-range graphics card based on the Navi 23 chip (RDNA 2  architecture) manufactured in the modern 7nm process. It features 1,792 cores (28 CUs - compute units) and 8 GB of fast GDDR6 graphics memory connected with a 128 Bit memory bus. The chip also includes 32 MB Infinity Cache. The clock speed of the cores will depend on the laptop according to AMD. The power consumption (TDP settings) ranges from 50 - 100 Watt with different clock speeds (similar to Nvidia).

At 100 Watt the game clock reaches 2177 MHz (max boost 2416 MHz) and the performance should be similar to a RTX 3060 for laptops. When Raytracing effects are activated, it falls behind the GeForce GPUs.

The Navi 21 chip is manufactured at TSMC in the modern 7nm process.