RX 6600XT + i5-11600K BUILD GUIDE & BENCHMARKS
First off I want to make it clear this video is sponsored by ASRock, and in it I’m going to be building all these parts into a killer gaming machine. What we’ve got here is an RX 6600 XT specifically ASRock’s Phantom Gaming version, as well as an Intel i5-11600K and an ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming ITX board that all crams into this phantom gaming edition Antec Striker case. Let’s get started with the build and I’ll run you through the parts as we go!
First we need to get this board filled, starting with the CPU. Now despite this being a tiny ITX motherboard, they’ve crammed a full 10 phase VRM setup with 90A chokes into something this small meaning it easily handles any chip you can throw at it all the way up to the i9-11900K.
With that said, I’m using this Intel i5-11600K, which is a 6 core 12 thread chip that can boost all the way up to 4.9GHz. It’s an impressive CPU and offers a good balance of price and performance. To install it, all you need to do is unhook the arm on the side of the socket and lift the retaining plate up and out the way, then line up the gold triangle on the chip with the triangle on the socket and gently place it down and in, then put the retaining plate back down and push the arm back down to where it was when we started. The plastic socket cover will pop off, so make sure to remove that from the board.
Next we are actually going to install the mounting bracket for the cooler, a Corsair H100i Elite Capellix. You’ll need to place the backplate on the backside of the board and thread each of the four standoffs through the holes around the socket. Once all four are in we can move on to installing the RAM.
Since this is an ITX board, we have two slots to work with here so I’ve got two sticks of this Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB RAM that are a total 16GB of DDR4-3200. Installation is simple, open the locking tabs at the top of both slots and line up the notch in the module with the notch in the slot. Slide the stick into the grooves of the socket and push it down evenly on both sides until it clicks into place on both ends. Repeat that for the second stick and that’s it done!
The last thing to add to the board is the main storage drive, specifically a 1TB M.2 SSD. What’s impressive is that this board actually supports both PCIe Gen 3 AND Gen 4 SSDs through the slot on the front, AND a second drive on the rear of the board so if you wanted a smaller Gen 4 drive as your boot and fast games drive, but a larger Gen 3 drive for more games and media that’s all supported here. I’ll be using the front slot here, so you’ll need to remove the two screws holding the heatsink in place, then slide the drive into the slot at a slight angle then flatten it down onto the preinstalled standoff at the back. You can then add a screw to hold the drive down in place, remove the plastic from the thermal pad and put the heatsink back down and reinsert the screws we removed earlier.
That’s it for the board for now, next up is installing the PSU in the case. We’ll need to remove all the external panels from the case so we can get access to the bottom section. Most of the panels either clip into place or use large thumbscrews so just unclip or unscrew them all, then we can slide this nice white Corsair CXF750 into place. You’ll want to install the four screws in the back to hold it in place, feeding the cables through the central section of the case. I like to pre-route the cables to make installing and connecting them up later as easy as possible, so feed the 24 pin to the top, 8 pin to the middle left and the PCIe power connectors to the back right.
We can then install the motherboard. This is nice and easy, line up the four standoffs with the holes in the board and install screws in each. You can plug in all the connectors, like the 24 pin at the top, the front panel connectors like the power button, USB 3 and the USB C header too, along with the 8 pin CPU power connector at the bottom left, the front panel audio at the bottom right, and the all important PCIe riser cable we’ll be using for our GPU.
Next let’s install the CPU cooler, this is a bit of an odd one as the case actually has a mount for the cooler on either in the middle or at the back. I’m going with the back, the catch being you’ll be mounting the fans on the outside of the bracket and running the screws through the fans, then the bracket, then into the radiator holding it all in place. Mount up both fans, then we can add a grain of rice sized drop of thermal paste to the CPU and place the block down onto it. Install all four thumbscrews to hold it in place, then we can route the cables.
This cooler uses an extra module which I’m hiding in the central section, so I’m routing all the wires into there and connecting them all up to the controller. Don’t forget the SATA power connector, the USB 2 header or the 3 pin sense wire to the CPU fan header which is the one closest to the 8 pin connector.
Last but certainly not least we’ve got the RX 6600 XT. This slides into the vertical slot in the front and is retained by two screws on the bottom. The PCIe power connector clips into place, then finally we can stick all the panels back on and get our OS and drivers installed.
So, now we’ve got it built, it’s time to see how it performs. I should note, if you are using this case the PCIe riser cable that comes included doesn’t support PCIe Gen 4 fully so you will need to boot either with a gen 3 GPU or use the integrated graphics to jump into the BIOS, update it, then set the PCIe link speed to Gen 3 then hook up the riser cable with the 6600 XT and you are all set.
I’m testing at both 1080p and 1440p here, running at either high or very high settings as that’s generally the best balance of visuals and performance, but of course you can tweak them to your personal preference. Starting with Watchdogs Legion, at 1080p the 6600 XT does really well in what is a pretty demanding game, hitting 85FPS average and well over 60FPS in the 1% lows. Even at 1440p you still get over 60FPS average at very high settings, so there is plenty of power available.
Cyberpunk running on high quality and high textures is quite possibly the most intensive game I test, so this system averaging 75FPS at 1080p is a great result. At 1440p it’s down to 45FPS average, but again that’s on high settings so personally I’d drop it to medium where you get around 60FPS average instead.
CSGO as always is a great performer, where even on the highest settings you get over 200FPS both at 1080p and at 1440p. If you were playing this competitively you’d want to swap to a more middle ground list of settings that would net you more like 300FPS or more, but as a casual player I’m sure I can “live with” well over 200…
Microsoft Flight is another pretty intensive game, and running on it’s High-End preset our build does an excellent job running at 85FPS average at 1080p and over 60FPS in the 1% lows, and almost exactly 60FPS average at 1440p also on the High-End preset. You could drop it to medium for a touch more performance, but for me High-End is the best balance of visuals and performance.
Finally, in Fortnite at high settings you get a whopping 195FPS average, and 140FPS in the 1% lows. I’m pretty confident in saying that’s plenty. At 1440p you might be a little confused why we’ve only dropped around 4FPS average, that’s because when using the High preset at 1440p it changes the render scale to 75% which is exactly 1080p, then upscales that. The end result is improved image quality for next to no performance loss which is great. Of course if you’d rather see full 1440p you can change that but I was pretty happy with that slight tradeoff.
| Game | 1080p AVG | 1080p 1% Low | 1440p AVG | 1440p 1% Low |
| Watchdogs Legion – Very High | 85 | 65 | 62 | 49 |
| Cyberpunk 2077 – High | 74.48 | 55 | 44.67 | 36.31 |
| CSGO – High | 225.25 | 106.95 | 212.55 | 91.41 |
| MS Flight – High-End | 85.14 | 63.49 | 59.79 | 50.89 |
| Fortnite – High | 195.08 | 139.47 | 190.61 | 136.61 |
As you can tell by the results, this is a rather well balanced machine. The 11600K is a great pair to the 6600 XT and really doesn’t lead to much if any bottlenecking. Thanks to the Z590 board, if you did want to step up to say the 8 core i7 that’s well supported and can be paired with an even higher end GPU without difficulty.
So, that’s how to build a system like this and how well it performs. I’ll be leaving links both to the motherboard and GPU, and the rest of the parts in the description below for you to check out.
