The current generation of graphics technology has already marked one of the most competitive and exciting periods in graphics card history. This does not just apply to the high-end graphics cards, but rather the entire market. In the past the mainstream market segment has been fought by previous generation technology. Rather than create an entirely new product line from the ground up, manufacturers such as ATi and NVIDIA take a less costly approach. Generally they develop the high end and then use the previous generation flagship products as mid-range solutions.
This was not the case with the GeForce 6600 GT and as a result it is still live and kicking. In fact the GeForce 6600 GT is still the most rapidly selling mid-range graphics card and has been for almost a year now. Recently ATi have begun to counter attack this product with their own version know as the Radeon X800 GT, the degree of their success is still a little unknown and will be for a while to come. On the other hand most manufacturers are still right behind their GeForce 6600 GT products pushing them into the market. ASUS not so long ago announced another GeForce 6600 GT based product, bringing the grand total to three.
However, this new GeForce 6600 GT is unlike any other ASUS product, in fact it is unlike any other GeForce 6600 GT products currently available. Why, you ask? This product is completely silent thanks to its passively cooled heatpipe design. Yes I know, passively cooled graphics cards are certainly nothing new, but this one is! Everyone knows ASUS never likes to do things the same way as everyone else, that's just boring. Therefore they have re-invented the passively cooled graphics card, creating the ?ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer?
Before we move on to discuss this graphics card in more detail, let's just take a moment to go over the GeForce 6600 GT core. The GeForce 6600 series is still built on the NV43 GPU using the 0.11-micron process. It has all the basic core features of the NV40. Furthermore the 6600 series supports all the latest GeForce features found on the high-end 6800 graphics cards. The pixel pipelines have been halved from 16 of the GeForce 6800 cards, to 8 for the 6600 series. However even with 8, the GeForce 6600 easily out muscles the GeForce PCX series with double the pixel pipelines.
As mentioned earlier, the clock frequencies have also been wound down, reducing the cards memory bandwidth. However, GeForce 6600 does utilize GDDR3 on a 128-bit memory bus in either 128 or 256MB configurations. The GeForce 6600 series comes in two flavors; the standard GeForce 6600 and then the GeForce 6600 GT. The GeForce 6600 will feature a 300MHz core and a 550MHz DDR memory frequency. It has also been said that the manufacturer can configure the memory as they please for the standard GeForce 6600. The GeForce 6600 GT is more high-end and features a core clock of 500MHz and a memory clock of 1GHz.
