XFX GeForce 6600 Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Timely Upgrade

ATI has finally played its cards (no pun intended) early last month but as we have mentioned before, getting your hands on the new Radeons at the day of launch may be more frustrating than the long delay. After a month since the launch, the situation seems to have improved slightly but with many vendors still yet to launch their versions, there is an opening for its rival, NVIDIA. It has to show that it has not been idling while ATI grabs the headlines. Hence, we have seen NVIDIA quickly retaliate with the launch of two new entrants to its existing GeForce 6 series to keep ATI in check. The first is the very attractively priced GeForce 6800 GS, which seems the perfect counter to the Radeon X1600 series. Our review of this card shows that its performance is close to a GeForce 6800 GT in many benchmarks despite its much lower price. The second is a card that we shall be looking at today, a new variant of the GeForce 6600.

While the original GeForce 6600 has been a rather popular card together with the slightly beefier GeForce 6600 GT in the mid-range market, the new Radeon X1300 PRO has shown that it is more than capable of matching the performance of the vanilla GeForce 6600. Therefore, NVIDIA has decided to give its SKU a much awaited upgrade to better compete with ATI's new generation. The core and architecture of the card remains the same, but everything else seems to have been revamped for the better. From the original 300MHz core clock, the new GeForce 6600 will now be clocked slightly higher at 350MHz. The memory parts see the most change with the initial 550MHz DDR1 memory now completely changed to an 800MHz DDR2 part. The lower cost of DDR2 memory and its much higher clock speeds probably influenced NVIDIA's decision. Also, the memory size has been doubled from 128MB to 256MB in the new GeForce 6600. From what we gather, this new GeForce 6600 DDR2 variant will co-exist alongside the original GeForce 6600 series for now. You may also know that MSI had previously introduced a Diamond edition of the GeForce 6600, which had rather similar specifications, though with only 128MB of memory. A case of its vendors foreshadowing this move by NVIDIA perhaps?

With the new configuration, the GeForce 6600 DDR2 promises to match up to the challenge of the fledging Radeon X1300 series. Its technical specifications place it right in between the existing, older GeForce 6600 and the GeForce 6600 GT, a niche that is exploited now by the Radeon X1300 PRO. To see if the rejuvenated GeForce 6600 can stand up to its ATI rival, we have the XFX GeForce 6600 256MB DDR2 in our labs today, a card that has been overclocked by XFX as befitting the company's reputation for extreme graphics cards. Read on to find out if it's worth its salt.

XFX's unique and elaborate packaging comes with layers of cardboard and plastic before we could get our hands on the card. It certainly stands out from the usual rectangular boxes.

XFX GeForce 6600 256MB DDR2 Technical Specifications

GraphicsEngine	NVIDIA GeForce 6600GPU Stock 3D GPU clock= 400MHz 8 pixel renderingpipelines 3 vertex pipelines(geometry engines) 128-bit DDR2memory controller CineFX3.0 Shading Engine Vertex Shaders Support for DX9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0 DisplacementMapping VertexFrequency Stream Divider (GeometryInstancing) Infinitelength vertex programs (supported inhardware) Pixel Shaders Support for DX9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0 Full pixelbranching support MultipleRender Targets (MRTs) Infinitelength pixel programs (supported inhardware) Texturing EngineFeatures Up to 16textures per rendering pass Support for 16-bit and 32-bit floating pointformats Support forsRGB texture format for gamma textures DirectX andS3TC texture compression Full128-bit FP Precision Graphics Pipeline Native supportfor 32 / 64 / 128 bits per pixelrendering modes UltraShadow IITechnology (accelerates shadowcomputations) Intellisample 3.0Technology 16x AnisotropicFiltering Adaptive TextureFiltering Rotated GridAntialiasing Fast antialiasingand compression performance Loss-less Color,Texture and Z-Data Compressionalgorithms (in real time) Fast Z-clear High-resolutionCompression Technology (HCT) increasesperformance at high resolutions. Advanced Video andDisplay Functionality Dedicated on-chipvideo processor MPEG videoencode and decode WMV9 decodeacceleration Advancedadaptive de-interlacing High qualityvideo scaling and filtering IntegratedNTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions upto 1024x768 with built-in Macrovision copy protection DVD and HDTV-readyMPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080iresolutions Dual 400MHzRAMDACs that support resolutions of2048x1536@85Hz Dual DVO ports forinterfacing external TMDStransmitters and external TV/HDTV encoder Microsoft VideoMixing Renderer (VMR) nViewMulti-display Technology Digital VibranceControl (DVC) 3.0 NVIDIA High-PrecisionDynamic-Range (HPDR) Technology Advanced thermalmonitoring and thermal management
GraphicsMemory	256MB Graphic DDR2SDRAM Default memory clock =400MHz (800MHz DDR) 128-bit memoryinterface
RAMDAC	Dual integrated 10-bitper channel 400 MHz DACs thatsupport resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz Integrated 165 MHzTMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant andHDCP ready)
Connectors	1 x analog VGAconnector 1 x DVI-I connector 1 x mini-DIN connector
Drivers& Software	Driver support forWindows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP FarCry 3D Edit
OtherInformation	16-lane PCI Expressexpansion slot required



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