Well I joined the owners club in the end. Thanks again to
@Poneros &
@Harlequin for their links/responses earlier in this thread. I paired the 6500XT with the OCUK Ryzen 5600X/AUROS Elite AX V2/RAM bundle & case, PSU, NVMe SSD etc (next-day delivery & excellent service as ever, thank you OCUK). It might be overkill for what I need but so far seems to suit my use case very well.
Grim Dawn &
Starcraft 2 run over 100fps @ 1440p on max settings. Was also living the dream earlier today playing
Quake 1.5 on
Darkplaces at insane fps
I haven't owned an AMD GPU since the 6950 and my last 4 graphics cards have all been Nvidia so I've become used to the Geforce Experience App. This Radeon Software monitoring and overlay was immediately useful (shows my card sitting at 7w and 35 degrees in the Windows 11 desktop).
Overall glad this card exists because if it didn't I probably wouldn't have bought a new PC at this time and made do or looked at something else. I saw Gibbo's recent RX6600 deal but I just couldn't bring myself to spend the extra. Hopefully there will be more competition in this budget sector.