ASUS Extreme N6600 GT Graphics Card

We received a pair of ASUS Extreme N6600 GT graphics cards as an addition to the A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard, the foundation of the SLI platform we’re assembling. Unlike the mainboard, the graphics cards came to us as they come to OEMs, i.e. packed in antistatic bags only. We needed these cards to investigate SLI technology, so it doesn’t matter much. Here’s how an ASUS Extreme N6600 GT graphics card looks like:

It differs from the classic GeForce 6600 GT with the deep blue color of the PCB only; the ASUS card is otherwise identical to the reference sample, except the design of the cooling system. The cooler from ASUS has the dimensions of the reference one, but that’s all there’s similar between the two. The heatsink here is a copper plate with ribs on its right. The fan made of translucent plastic has nine blades (against the reference fan’s seven blades), but the blades are thinner. Contrary to our expectations, there’s no highlighting of the fan’s blades.

This entire contraption is covered with a translucent aerodynamic casing so that the air stream from the fan went through the heatsink’s ribs and outside, also cooling the memory chips. In fact, we could say that this is a diminished and simplified version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra reference cooling system, but we’ve got an axial cooler rather than a blower here. This cooler is quiet ?you don’t hear its noise against the noise from other PC components, even outside the system case.

Unlike many other manufacturers, ASUS put heatsinks on the memory chips on its GeForce 6600 GT. There two copper heatsinks each cools a pair of chips. No intricate fastenings here ?the heatsinks are simply glued to the chips with thermal glue. The chip closest to the back of the PCB is additionally blown at by the GPU cooler. The ASUS Extreme N6600 GT is positioned as a device suitable for overclockers, so these heatsinks confirm this product positioning.

Especially for such users the GDDR3 chips have an access time of 1.6 nanoseconds rather than 2.0 nanoseconds as on a majority of other GeForce 6600 GT cards. We couldn’t check up the marking on the chips as their heatsinks were dead-glued to them, but our overclocking attempt bears indirect evidence to that: the memory worked stable at 600 (1200DDR) MHz. We also lifted the GPU frequency up to 600MHz, so this graphics card is true to the Extreme designation in its own name.

The 2D quality was up to the mark, too. The card yielded a crystal-sharp picture in all resolutions up to 1800x1440@75Hz inclusive.

We dealt with two OEM samples of the ASUS Extreme N6600 GT graphics card, but these cards will come to retail fully rigged out, with numerous accessories as you see with other products from ASUS. We’re left highly pleased with the Extreme N6600 GT as we just can’t find any obvious faults with this device.