|
nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP Review |
|
Written by Phyro
|
|
Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
It is raining reviews, so also Gamers-Depot has published their review on the nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP. nVidia's launch of its GeForce 6600GT last month embarked a new price to performance ratio thats meant gamers on a budget could in fact enjoy excellent performance in many of today's shipping games with a bit of headroom for the future. What was missing, however, was an AGP version of it so the masses could all take advantage of it.
 nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP Review
The wait will soon be over as the AGP version will start shipping to retail
outlets everywhere very soon.
This card looks rather identical to the
PCI-Express version with the exception of a single Molex power connector PCI
Express can deliver more voltage thru the bus as opposed to AGP so that's why
this card does have the Molex connector. Additionally, our reference card was
equipped with dual DVI outputs as opposed to the single VGA and DVI outputs on
the PCI-E version. The heatsink is also a bit different as it not only has a
spiffy-looking Doom 3 sticker -
it's mounted at a more abrupt angle as well.
The 500MHz GPU core and
900MHz (450MHz DDR) memory are here as well, and like the PCI-E version this one
does have a bit of headroom in it for overclocking as well. Using nVidia's
overclocking driver tool, we were able to push our card ever-so-slightly up a
bit to 548MHz on the GPU core and 1.12MHz on the RAM side.
Our only wish
here is that nVidia would
release a 256MB version as many of the future games and even a few current
ones can really take advantage of additional on-board memory, especially in
light of the fact that this is using the more bandwidth-challenged AGP
bus.
Looking at the benchmarks does prove that performance between the AGP and PCI-E versions is very close, where it's typically less than a frame or two that separates them. AGP users should look no further for a best-in-class solution for under $200 dollars. With older cards still looming in that price-range the choice should be clear if you want a nice performance increase
without breaking the bank the 6600GT AGP is the one to get.
The overclocked performance is nice bonus to those willing to push the hardware a bit and should run great under most applications. We never had any issues with
our reference card running at the higher speeds.
nVidia's move to AGP does beat ATI and should help them start selling even more cards inside the retail channel and perhaps even more OEM deals. nVidia's aggressive nature in the value sector means that more gamers can start enjoying the benefits of Shader Model 3.0 support and OpenEXR support in games that utilize those
technologies. It accelerates games faster than many older cards still priced in its same price category and helps move an entire industry forward. Remember, the more gamers using more advanced GPU technology the more games we'll see take advantage of said tech.
In the end, it looks as if nVidia has another sure-fire winner on its hands with the 6600GT AGP if you really want to hop on board the DX9c Train, then wait no more because this one is parked in the depot,
waiting for users to jump on-board and start enjoying gaming at new price/performance ratios.
|
TpuGPU-Z v0.3.0
