Noise, Power Consumption, Overclocking, 2D Quality

Although that tiny fan of the cooler is rotating at the full speed, the card is virtually silent even in an open testbed. You can hear a quiet hissing of air only if you are listening to it with your ear next to the card. Theoretically, you can make the card even quieter by means of the RivaTuner utility, but we wouldn?t recommend you to do so because the heatsink is very small and the card may overheat without sufficient air cooling.

The XFX GeForce 6600 GDDR2 proved to be a very economical product. It consumed a mere 27.6W under maximum load, and 12.3W when idle. This is far below the numbers of the GeForce 6600 GT (47.9W and 18.5W, respectively). For comparison, the RADEON X1300 PRO consumes about 30W under load, which is natural enough, considering its high GPU frequency.

GPU overclocking was quite rewarding. We lifted the frequency of the graphics processor from the initial 400MHz to 550MHz by setting an additional 120mm fan up to blow along the card. The memory could only be overclocked from 400 (800) to 440 (880) MHz, but this is a good result for 2.5ns chips all the same.

As for the image quality in 2D applications, the XFX GeForce 6600 GDDR2 yielded a sharp picture, without shadowing or fuzziness, on both its outputs (DVI and D-Sub) up to 1800x1440@75Hz display mode.