As a continuation on our evaluation of the nForce4-SLI hardware that Asus sent us for review, we are going to take a closer look at Asus’ SLI compatible Extreme N6600GT series of video cards. This is Part 2 of a three part suite of articles. Part 1 took a look at the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard which performed well, and is one of the first SLI capable motherboards to the market. This article, Part 2, will evaluate how well a standalone EN6600GT performs, and in Part 3 we will delve into the performance SLI gives you, any issues that were encountered and what we think of the technology.
Part 2 – Video Card – Asus Extreme N6600GT
The Asus Extreme N6600GT is part of the nVidia GeForce6 GPU family of video cards and uses the new higher bandwidth PCI-Express interface. Having the bleeding edge performance-and-cost 6800 series cards as its bigger brother, the 6600GT series of video cards are geared toward the gamer with a budget with a price tag around $200! The GT variant is different than the basic 6600 cards in that the graphics processor is 200 MHz faster than the stock 6600, and it uses GDDR3 with a 128bt memory bus instead of GDDR memory yielding much faster memory clock speeds.
Below is a comparison chart showing the differences between several Geforce6 series graphics cards:
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Card
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Pixel Pipelines
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Vertex Pipelines
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Core Speed
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Memory Speed
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Memory Type
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Memory Size
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6800GT
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16
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6
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350 MHz
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1000 Mhz
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256-bit GDDR3
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256 MB
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6800
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12
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5
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325 MHz
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700 Mhz
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256-bit GDDR
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128 MB
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6600GT
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8
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3
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500 MHz
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1000 Mhz
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128-bit GDDR3
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128/256 MB
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6600
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8
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3
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300 MHz
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550 Mhz
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64/128-bit GDDR
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128 MB
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As you can see the 6600 series uses 4 less pixel and 2 less vertex pipelinesthan the base 6800 series. Though with the 6600GT model with its higher clock and memory speeds, on paper it should produce some very good results at lower resolutions, but get bogged down at higher resolutions as compared to the 6800’s. Higher resolutions are where you see a big impact on the number pixel and vertex pipelines the GPU has available (a 1600×1200 screen has roughly 2.4 times more pixels to perform calculations for than a 1024×768 screen).
Here are the specifications and a full feature list for the Asus Extreme N6600GT:
Asus Extreme N6600GT Specifications:
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Feature
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Description
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Graphics Engine
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GeForce 6600GT
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Video Memory
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128 M DDR3
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Engine Clock
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500MHz
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Memory Clock
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1GHz(500MHz DDR3)
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RAMDAC
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400MHz
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Bus Standard
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PCI-Express
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Memory Interface
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128-bit
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Max Resolution
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2048×1536
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VGA Output
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Standard 15-pin D-sub
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TV Output
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S-Video
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DVI Output
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DVI-I
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2nd VGA Output
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Yes
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nVidia GeForce 6600GT Features:
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