AMD RX 6500 XT Review ft. Gigabyte Eagle

For today's review, AMD sampled us with the Gigabyte RX 6500 XT Eagle. It ships in a black box with Gigabyte's robotic eye logo visible on the front.

On the back, the company highlights various key features of the design, including the fans, direct heatpipe contact and ‘durable' PCB components.

The only included accessory is a basic quick start guide.

As for the card itself, it's a fairly basic design overall which is to be expected for a GPU of this class. The overall shroud design is very much in keeping with other Eagle models we have reviewed in the past, meaning it is made of grey plastic and is quite blocky in its shape.

The fans measure 80mm across, and as we'd expect, they feature Gigabyte's ‘alternate spinning technology', meaning one fan spins clockwise while the other spins anti-clockwise, which Gigabyte claims helps to reduce air turbulence, and thus direct more air down onto the heatsink.

If it's not apparent from the photos as well, this is quite a diminutive card, measuring 192 x 117 x 38mm. It's not quite as small as the Palit RTX 3060 StormX OC we looked at last year, but it would still be a suitable option for most Mini-ITX cases.

The front side of the card is also basic to look at, with the Gigabyte and Radeon logos visible, but not much else. There's no backplate as mentioned – not even a plastic one – so instead we get a direct view of the back of the PCB.

All RX 6500 XT cards will require a single 6-pin connector as the 107W TGP is above the 75W that can be supplied through the PCIe x16 slot alone.

Meanwhile, display outputs are sparse, with a single HDMI 2.1 port and one DisplayPort 1.4a connector.

Become a Patron!

Be sure to check out our sponsors store EKWB here