NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT Roundup. Round 1: PCI-E
Introduction
This material is the first part of review on benchmarking GeForce 6600GT video cards made by various manufacturers. The need and urgency for such a review is beyond doubts - all the cards to be reviewed are positioned (and sell) over the mainstream sector (over 200$) so popular among the consumers (and thrifty gamers, first).
Video boards made on the chip currently in questions are not sold for the PCI-Express market, but in the AGP make as well, so we found it useful to partition the material in two parts, which is helpful in avoiding the heaps of graphs and the overall mess.
Well, let's go ahead. These days, things in the middle PCI-E sector are hot to the highest degree because NVIDIA and ATI contributed their very successful solutions to the sector. ATI is still undergoing some sort of "transition period" - all are waiting for X800 to hit the retail. Furthermore, the Canadian company brought a nice New Year gift to all the consumers through pushing down the prices recommended for the recently announced Õ800XL and Õ800.
While the former is poorly related to the topic of this material because of the price, the X800 is best suited to today's topic. But that is still in prospect. Hopefully, X800 cards will not be too long to appear in the retail.
The already known Radeon X700 PRO will be reviewed as a rival to boards based on the GeForce 6600GT chip. Unlike its competitor lacking suffixes in the names (X700), the board is enjoying a successful travel over the retail shelves.
In the AGP sector, ATI is a bit less confident. The only thing to oppose (for today!) NVIDIA 6600GT AGP equipped with the HSI (High-Speed Interconnect) bridge is 9800Pro (XT). 9800Pro(XT) has turned outdated in terms of technology and performance... In fact, we'll be comparing the performance in detail in the second part. Back to our PCI-Express.
We are reviewing five video cards made by the most eminent partners of NVIDIA: ASUS, Gigabyte, Leadtek, Gainward, and XFX. All these are not new kids on the market, including the Russian market as well. There is some exception - XFX Graphics, a brand much less known on the Russian market unlike Leadtek, let alone ASUS and Gigabyte. Nevertheless, XFX is one of the major partners of NVIDIA and has been at manufacturing the chips of the company for quite a long time.
Nowadays, with the competition getting acute from day to day, no one can afford to rest on laurels. The market is getting more cruel and narrow all the time, expelling those unable setting the pace or getting into the swing outboard.
Well, we could contemplate endlessly on the subject, but being aware of your impatience, let's get back to our guinea pigs..
Not only do the boards differ in design and package bundle, they also offer some technical distinctions which are more amenable to review if summed up in a table:
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MoBo:
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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