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nVidia's GeForce 6600GT AGP: The Little Bridge that Could |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 17 November 2004 |
AnandTech on his turn also published a review on the nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP. Intel did a very good job of drumming up support for PCI Express over the past two years. Look around and note that all of the motherboard manufacturers have quite a few PCI Express based motherboard designs. Then look at the latest GPU launches from ATI and nVidia, all of the exciting products appear to be launched first (or primarily) as PCI Express designs. While everyone industry-wide has done a great job of supporting PCI Express, there's one little problem - no one seems to be interested in buying PCI Express solutions just yet.
 nVidia's GeForce 6600GT AGP: The Little Bridge that Could
Even though nVidia has
gone to manufacturing native PCI Express GPUs (e.g. GeForce 6600GT), they
already have a working chip to bridge back down to an AGP interface, which is
what makes today's launch possible. Thanks to the use of nVidia's PCI Express-to-AGP
bridge chip, nVidia is able to
not only launch but also begin selling an AGP version of their GeForce 6600GT
today. We are told by nVidia
that cards should be available for sale today continuing a very recent trend of
announcing availability alongside a product launch, which we greatly
applaud.
nVidia's
6600GT was a strong performer when it was released as a PCI Express solution,
but now as an AGP card it is even stronger for two reasons:
- The market for a $200 - $250 AGP card is currently much larger than the
market for a PCI Express version of such a card, and
- ATI will be very late to market with their X700 XT AGP, thus giving the
6600GT AGP a unique window of opportunity for the remainder of 2004.
Compared to the $200 - $300 AGP cards available today, the GeForce 6600GT AGP can't be beat. While the Radeon 9800 Pro offers close performance in older games, switch to any of the latest titles and the 6600GT truly spreads its
wings.
The performance improvement the 6600GT offers over nVidia's older $200 price point card, the 5900XT, is nothing short of amazing. The performance comparisons we showed here today are a testament to how much nVidia has improved their core architecture since the days of NV3x, with the 6600GT completely demolishing the 5900XT in performance. Even the $400 5900 Ultra is outperformed by the 6600GT in almost all of the benchmarks.
nVidia didn't do anything that ATI couldn't have done with the 6600GT AGP, however it was nVidia's PCI Express to AGP bridge that they tested and validated
several months ago that gave nVidia the time to market advantage over ATI.
For the first time in recent history our GPU recommendation is clear: the best bang for your AGP buck is none other than the GeForce 6600GT.
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