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Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 18 November 2004 |
A new review appeared on Legion Hardware, as they have reviewed the Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT. Finally, the current generation mid-range graphics products are becoming available as manufacturers are storming the market with Radeon X700 and GeForce 6600 products.
 Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT Review
The GeForce 6600 series is still built on the NV43 GPU using an 0.11-micron
process, it has all the basic core features of the NV40. Furthermore the 6600
series supports all the latest GeForce features found on the high-end 6800
graphics cards. The pixel pipelines have been halved from 16 of the GeForce 6800
cards, to 8 for the 6600 series. However even with 8, the GeForce 6600 easily
out muscles the GeForce PCX series with double the pixel pipelines.
While
everyone is closely paying attention to who has won the graphics war and who is
wearing the graphics crown, by now it's clear there is no out-right winner. Sure
you could narrow it down by analyzing performance for over a dozen games, but
with such small margins it is hard to call a real winner. What makes this
decision even more difficult is the fact that the Radeon X700 Pro was often seen
making a late comeback, with 8xAA/16xAF enabled, to steal the show from the
GeForce 6600 GT. However this was not the case in all games.
Clearly the
GeForce 6600 GT is a Doom 3
champion, taking on the big guns from ATI. This is no surprise given the influence nVidia had on the game. The
previous comparisons between ATI
and nVidia in Doom 3 have also strongly favored
the nVidia based graphics
cards, so no real surprises here. The GeForce 6600 GT was compared to the Radeon
X700 Pro and not the X700XT. This could explain why the GeForce 6600 GT won just
about every test over the Radeon X700 Pro by a fair margin.
At the end of
the day I still find the performance of either the Gigabyte Radeon X700 Pro or
GeForce 6600 GT very compelling to say the least. The ability to still render
over 50fps at 1280x1024 in Far
Cry is simply amazing. The cards ability to glide through intense highly
detailed scenes, just makes game play so much more enjoyable. The most
impressive feature of these graphics cards is obviously the price tag. Both the
Gigabyte Radeon X700 Pro
and GeForce 6600 GT retail for $200 (or less) which makes them exceptionally
good value products.
Although Gigabyte has strictly followed the nVidia GeForce 6600 GT reference
design, their solution is far from generic. The card features a modified cooling
setup for the GPU which is constructed from copper. Not only does this cooling
setup do an exceptional job at keeping the graphics card cool, it also allows
for quite a bit of overclocking headroom. The inclusion of Gigabyte's S-Video TV adapter
was also a nice feature of this GeForce 6600 GT graphics card.
Overall,
if it is performance you want, it is performance you will get with the Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT. It would seem nVidia has now got back on track after their previous FX generation
upset. The GeForce 6600 GT is a first class product. Not only has the frame rate performance dazzled me, but so too has the stunning visual quality and highly stable performance. The best part is this product will not cost you a fortune at just $200. The current generation mid-range graphics cards are certainly amongst the best value solutions ever released.
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ASUS 9800GTX+ (DK) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
