Radeon RX 7600 Deals Arrive Just In Time To Spoil NVIDIA's RTX 4060 Launch Party
As we told you on Friday, NVIDIA has officially announced its GeForce RTX 4060 card's launch date: June 29th, for $299 USD. We'll have a review for you when the time comes, but it's worth noting that AMD's current-gen part in this same price range is already cheaper thanks to a last-minute price cut. Whether that means that it's inferior remains to be seen, but folks who don't mind #FakeFrames will appreciate the DLSS 3 support of NVIDIA's new card.
Actually, while we say $269 (because that's the MSRP), you can actually find Radeon RX 7600 cards going a bit below that. Looking on Amazon, we see two models going for less than MSRP, both black-and-white cards with dual-fan coolers.
The cheaper of the two is this MSI Radeon RX 7600 MECH 2X Classic 8G OC card. Coming in at just $249, it also sports a tidy 40 MHz overclock, bringing its boost clock from the factory 2655 MHz up to 2695 MHz. Of course, actual clock rates will depend on temperatures and thermal limits and so on.
Like the reference card, it takes a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, has a total board power of 165W, and has three DisplayPort connections as well as an HDMI 2.1 port—although notably, it lacks DisplayPort 2.1 support. If you don't plan to use an 8K 120Hz monitor with your budget graphics card, then that probably doesn't matter.
Just eight dollars more gets you this XFX Speedster SWFT210 Radeon RX 7600 graphics card which skips the overclock, running at reference speeds. However, this card has DisplayPort 2.1 support on all three of its DP connections. It also retains the HDMI 2.1 port, as well. XFX uses larger fans than MSI does here; make sure your case has room for the extra height of the SWFT210's cooler.
Like the reference card and the MSI board above (as well as most other RX 7600 cards), it takes a single 8-pin PCIe power connector and is rated for a total board power of 165W. XFX echoes the AMD recommendation of a 550W power supply for this card, and you'll also want to make sure you have a free PCIe slot available—at least x8, physically x16, and preferably PCIe 4.0.
There are a bunch of graphics cards available in the $250-300 range right now. The Radeon RX 7600 faces competition from the GeForce RTX 3060, Intel Arc A750, and even its own last-gen Radeon RX 6600 XT and 6650 XT cards.
Out of those, it's arguably the best choice; while the GeForce RTX 3060 has 12GB of video RAM and the Arc A750 has superior ray-tracing performance, the GeForce card is a last-gen part with high power usage and lack of AV1 support, while the Arc card, despite having made huge strides since launch, does still have driver issue considerations particularly in older games.
Later this week, NVIDIA throws the GeForce RTX 4060 into that pile, and it will be fascinating to see how it scatters the pile. Right now, though, it's easy to see how the Radeon RX 7600 makes a compelling choice—especially at just $249.
