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Gigabyte GeForce 6600 Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
nV News put up another review, this time it is for the Gigabyte GeForce 6600 graphics card. The card follows nVidia's reference design with little, or no, exceptions. It's small at approximately 7¼ x 4½ inches with a 3 x 3 inch copper heatsink and fan (HSF) providing air flow for cooling the graphics processing unit (GPU). Notice that the card does not require a power connector as sufficient power is supplied through the motherboard's PCI-Express
connection.
 Gigabyte GeForce 6600 Review
Looking closer at the GeForce 6600's specifications, we find the supported PCI-Express 16x interface and 128MB of Hynix DDR SDRAM, which are allocated in 8 chips on the front side of the circuit board. This RAM is rates at 3.6ns, which translates to a clock speed of 275MHz (550MHz effective). The GeForce 6600 GPU is based on the NV43 core and runs at a core frequency of 300MHz, which is 200MHz less than the GeForce 6600 GT. Additional specifications include a 128-bit memory bus, 8 pixel pipelines, and 3 vertex processing units.
With a price that will not put a huge dent in your wallet the PCI-E Gigabyte 6600 is a deal for the casual gamer, or the gamer who is upgrading to PCI-Express on a tight budget. Performance-wise you are looking at a card
capable of competing with the performance norms of the previous generation high end cards with improved graphics and IQ at moderate resolutions up to 1280x1024.
The 6600 is the present generation's current mid-range offering. But considering the performance capabilities that label may be a little deceiving. Looking at the potential performance increase this card may be just the ticket for those gamers who cannot afford an high-end or enthusiast card but would like to have the graphical improvements nVidia's latest generation of video cards have to offer.
The 6600 supports better pixel shader implementation (SM2.0) and the latest in pixel shader implementation (SM3.0) as well as other graphical improvements used by game developers. I would prefer faster DDR SDRAM than the
3.6ns installed on this card but it could have been a cost consideration and this ram does run cool and stable. The 128-bit memory limitation severely impacts performance in higher application antialiasing and anisotropic
filtering. Still, sufficient application is possible, at 1024x768, with this card for some awesome image quality.
The bottom line is the Gigabyte 6600 provides you with the performance and image quality to play your games the way the developer intended. That is, the games are fun to play and look awesome!
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ASUS 9800GTX+ (DK) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
