It can be hard to find a PC gaming graphics card at a low price these days, but however low your budget is, we thoroughly recommend staying away from the new Asus Radeon RX 6500 XT Dual OC V2 that’s just come out. Not only is it based on a GPU that’s now two and half years old, but this GPU stank even back then.
Asus makes some of the best graphics cards you can buy right now, and I particularly like the quiet and powerful coolers on its latest ROG Strix cards, even if they’re a bit overpriced. A graphics card is only as good as the GPU under its cooler, though, and while AMD makes some decent GPUs, the Radeon RX 6500 XT is definitely not one of them.
AMD wouldn’t even send me a sample for review when it came out, and neither would any of the board partners I contacted. You only need to look at some of the other press coverage to see why. Launched in January 2022, Radeon RX 6500 XT reviews weren’t just bad, they were scathing, and sometimes even expletive-ridden. GamersNexus said it was “worse than 2016’s GPUs,” as shown in the video below, while Hardware Unboxed simply described it as the “worst GPU” in its review.
What went wrong? Cast your mind back to 2022, when there was a worldwide GPU shortage and it was impossible to buy any graphics cards at their MSRP. There was a gap in the market for a budget GPU, and it didn’t even really need to be any good for people to potentially hand over $200 for it. That was when AMD released the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which now stands as a prime example of what happens when you cut too many corners.
Based on the Navi 24 GPU used for AMD’s mobile GPUs at the time, this desktop card had just 1,024 stream processors, which was half the number on the massively superior Radeon RX 6600 XT, but that was only the start of its problems. AMD also equipped it with an extremely tight 64-bit memory interface, resulting in a pitiful memory bandwidth of just 143.9GB/s, and you only got 4GB of VRAM too.
Not only that, but AMD equipped the card with a miserly 4x PCIe 4.0 interface, which might be fine for the card’s performance on a PCIe 4.0 system, but meant it only had half that PCIe bandwidth on a PCIe 3.0 rig. This was a big deal in 2022, Intel’s 10th-gen Comet Lake CPUs had come out just two years earlier with no PCIe 4.0 support, and plenty of people only had older PCIe 3.0 motherboards for their AMD CPUs.
Anyway, for some reason Asus has just launched a brand new graphics card based on this GPU. On the surface, it looks like a decent card, with its two cooling fans and carbon fiber-esque appearance. Asus has even given it a decent overclock, which takes the game clock from 2,610MHz to 2,670MHz, but this won’t be enough to make this card worth buying.
Asus hasn’t announced pricing for the new V2 card yet, but the V1 version currently goes for $179 on Amazon, and you can do much better. If you really need a cheap graphics card now, take my advice and avoid this new Asus card, and instead pick up a second-hand Radeon RX 6600 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 on eBay.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a bit more power, the Radeon RX 7600 and GeForce RTX 4060 from the current generation will give you much more gaming performance if you can afford them.