The GeForce 6600 video card was initially released as a PCI-Express video card. Recently Nvidia released an AGP version of the 6600 for those who have not made the leap to the new bus type. Nvidia places the 6600 series in the performance category while the biggest and baddest 6800 is in the enthusiast category. Currently there are two models of the 6600 line, the regular 6600 and 6600GT which is faster than the regular 6600. This particular card that is on the review table today is a Chaintech GeForce 6600GT.
PCI-Express vs. AGP
Like I mentioned in the introduction this 6600 series was initially released only as PCI-Express. Because PCI-Express is not mature enough, many people are not able to make the move yet. There isn’t a big difference between the PCI-Express and AGP versions of this card but there are some. The memory on the PCI-Express version runs 100MHz faster than the AGP version at stock speeds. The memory bandwidth is also higher with the PCI-Express version which is probably due to the higher memory speed and the PCI-Express bus. Below is a table from Nvidia that outlines compares the two types of this card.
Technical Specifications
CineFX 3.0 Shading Architecture
- Vertex Shaders
- Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
- Displacement mapping
- Geometry instancing
- Infinite length vertex programs
- Pixel Shaders
- Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
- Full pixel branching support
- Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
- Infinite length pixel programs
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
- Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
- Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
- Support for non-power of two textures
- Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
- DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending1
- Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
- Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
- Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
- Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions
Intellisample 3.0 Technology2
- Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering
- Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
- New rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
- Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
- Fast z-clear
- High-resolution compression technology (HCT) increases performance at higher resolutions through advances in compression technology
UltraShadow II Technology
- Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games, like id Software’s Doom 3
Advanced Video and Display Functionality
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- MPEG video encode and decode
- WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
- High-quality video scaling and filtering
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048 × 1536 at 85Hz
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- Full NVIDIA® nView™ multi-display technology capability
Advanced Display Functionality
- Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048×1536 at 85hz
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Full NVIDIA® nView™ multi-display technology capability
Advanced Engineering
- Designed for PCI Express x16
- Support for AGP 8X including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
- Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
- Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring
NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0
- DVC color controls
- DVC image sharpening controls
Operating Systems
- Windows XP
- Windows ME
- Windows 2000
- Windows 9X
- Macintosh OS, including OS X
- Linux
API Support
- Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
- Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 1.5
The box for this GeForce 6600GT is pretty extravagant and shiny. The front sports a warrior looking guy and also tells you that a full version of Painkiller is included within. The back of the box has a lot of specifications and features of the card so you know what it can do.
This video card comes with a good amount of accessories and software. The accessories included are a S-Video Cable (150cm), S-Video to HDTV Cable, DVI to VGA Adapter, and Y-Molex adapter. The bundled software titles are WinDVD 5 (6 Channel), WinDVD Creator 2, WinRip 2.1, Adobe Photoshop Album 1.0, Home Theater 2.1 Lite, DVD Copy 2 Lite, Game pack (5 demos), and Painkiller (Full version) and the driver CD of course.
The card has a bright blue PCB and uses a different heatsink design from Nvidia’s reference design. The benefit to this heatsink design is hopefully better cooling than the Nvidia reference one could produce. Although the 6600 series of video cards was originally only for PCI-Express they were recently adapted for AGP use, thus the AGP connection.
The card has a DVI, VGA, and HDTV & TV-out (Mini Din 10pin S-Video) connector so you can use this card with just about any display out there. The card also requires a 4-pin Molex connection to provide extra power that the AGP slot cant muster up.
I removed the heatsink to find that a good amount of thermal compound was used on the 6600GT core. There is also a HSI (High Speed Interconnect) like the early PCI-Express video cards used. This HSI translates the information so that it can be transmitted through the AGP bus since the core was originally designed for PCI-Express. This card has 128MB of memory and uses Samsung K4J55323QF-GC16 GDDR3 chips. The memory is rated for 600MHz (1200MHz DDR) operation which is 100MHz faster than the card is clocked at. This 100MHz will allow you to easily overclock the memory to 600MHz and hopefully a little faster. These chips are rated for 256-bit operation however the card is rated for 128-bit.
I will be benchmarking with Half-Life 2, FarCry 1.3, Unreal Tournament 2004, 3DMark03, and 3DMark05. The following is a listing of the demos that were used for each game benchmark. Half-Life 2: Hardware OC Coast, Unreal Tournament 2004: dm-rankin, as-convoy, br-colossus (averaged together), FarCry 1.3: BenchemallDefaultDemo. The first set of benchmarks will use no anti aliasing and no anisotropic filtering and the second will use 4x anti aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. For the remainder of the review anti aliasing will be referred to as AA and anisotropic filtering will be referred to as AF.
Test Bed:
- Gigabyte K8NS Pro
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL
- Chaintech GeForce 6600GT
- Vantec Stealth 470w PSU
- Plextor PX-708A
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive
- Windows XP SP2, DirectX 9c, Nvidia 66.93 drivers
Half-Life 2 is obviously one of if not the most anticipated game of the year and now that its here it may be time for an upgrade. As you can see the 5700 Ultra suffers even at 1024×768 and obviously wouldn’t be playable. With the 6600GT the FPS skyrockets and remains high even at 1600×1200.
With FarCry the 5700 Ultra really suffers even at 1024×768. I know from personal experience that while playing FarCry there are parts where it gets really choppy. When I actually play the game I have to turn all of the quality settings to low so that I am able to play. With this 6600GT you can see that there are no problems, even at 1600×1200 it shouldn’t get choppy. I also played FarCry with this card and it was so much better, I was even able to set everything to high and throw in some AA and AF.
Unreal Tournament isn’t as graphically intensive as Half-Life 2 or FarCry so the results are much better for both cards. Both cards performed really well with all of the resolutions but the 6600GT did do much better with each resolution.
3DMark03 is a synthetic benchmark made by Futuremark as you probably already know. This benchmark runs a series of simulated game tests and gives you a score based on the performance. The 6600GT gives you a considerable boost in score, especially at the default setting of 1024×768.
3DMark05 is the successor to 3DMark03 and throws much more at your video card than 3DMark03 does. With the 5700 Ultra none of the scores break 1000 which is very low in comparison to this 6600GT. With all of the resolutions the score is far above 100 and gets almost 3000 3DMarks at the default 1024×768.
I then set both cards to 4x AA and 8x AF to get some better image quality while gaming. The 5700 Ultra suffers even more with this round of benchmarking while the 6600GT effortlessly cranks out the FPS. The image quality is greatly improved with these settings and there is only a small hit to the FPS that you shouldn’t notice with the 6600GT.
Similar to the Half-Life 2 benchmarking the 5700 Ultra also suffered with FarCry. None of the FPS would be enjoyable to play with but with the 6600GT you would have a good time at 1024×768. The 6600GT at 1280×1024 and 1600×1200 were both choppy but with some overclocking this might be possible.
Overall Unreal Tournament 2004 did great with this 6600GT, even at 1600×1200. The 5700 Ultra is playable until 1600×1200 at which point the FPS drops to 29 which is borderline. Normally games start to look choppy around 30 FPS so during heavy action things might start to slow down.
3DMark03 scores take a hit across the board but still perform quite well with the 6600GT. Because this is a synthetic benchmark there are no real world results to talk about.
3DMark05 is very new and is quiet needy to say the least. The 6600GT actually failed at 1600×1200 while the 5700 Ultra failed at 1280×1024 and 1600×1200. The error recieved was “IDirect3DDevice9::CreateTexture failed: Out of video memory (D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY).” Again, this is a synthetic benchmark so don’t read too much into it, however if the card did have 256MB of memory this memory probably would not occur.
I needed to add the coolbits registry hack to my system before I could adjust the speed of the card. With it added I started overclocking the card from its stock speed of 500MHz core and 900MHz memory. I did the overclocking manually by moving the core and memory up gradually and testing stability by running 3DMark03. After pushing the card little by little I finally hit the wall at 592MHz core and 1.04GHz (1040MHz) memory. A gain of almost 100MHz on the core and 140MHz on the memory is very impressive. This extra speed should give you some more headroom if you want to bump up the anti aliasing or anisotropic filtering with your gaming.
Conclusion
I am very impressed with this video card, I didn’t think that it would make such a huge improvement. This is the kind of upgrade that makes spending the money worth while. Before the 6600GT I used the 5700 Ultra in my personal system and it simply wasn’t cutting it. Many of the games I would play were choppy with good image quality or ran ok but looked unimpressive because of the lacking AA and AF.
This card is also very overclockable to give you more than you paid for which is always great. All of the necessary accessories are included to take advantage of everything this card offers and the software bundle is great. If you are looking to upgrade your video card but cant afford a 6800 and don’t want to make the jump to PCI-Express this may be exactly what you are looking for.
Taking everything into consideration I am going to give this card a 10/10 and the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Chaintech for making this review possible.
Pros
- Great card for the newest games
- Affordable for great performance
- Full version of Painkiller
- Highly overclockable
- All necessary accessories included
- 8x AGP
Cons
- None