NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT on AGP

The heatsink design is pretty cool and the card seems to be spot on in most things. I wish I was using a really poor card at the moment so that I could make the excuse I needed a new one ;) .

Well I've got the excuse, so if you've got the money I'm sure we could put our heads together and come up with something ;)

<A88>

what size of memory was in that card 128mb or 256mb?

The good old 9800 Pro scrapes through again :D

The heatsink/fam combo doenst look at efficient at cooling. lol Imagine playing HL 2 on that for hours

Originally Posted by alexwilks88
Well I've got the excuse, so if you've got the money I'm sure we could put our heads together and come up with something ;)

<A88>

I've got an idea, how about you buy it for me? :D

As for the cooling design, wouldn't the air be propelled away from the CPU and RAM primarily? I suppose the hot air would eventually rise, but it would be a bit cooler by then.

Originally Posted by N4N01D
what size of memory was in that card 128mb or 256mb?

It's a 128MB frame buffer - sorry, all GeForce 6600GT's come with only 128MB.

The GeForce 6600 can have up to 256MB, though. But at the moment, there are no announcements being made about the introduction of the vanilla GeForce 6600 moving on to AGP.

Originally Posted by Dinh
The heatsink/fam combo doenst look at efficient at cooling. lol Imagine playing HL 2 on that for hours

It's actually very stable, I played through all games in the test suite for around 8-10 hours in total and didn't have a single blue screen/graphics lock up. ;)

im j/w if you ever thought of compairing it to a 6800 128mb (what i have). because i would like to see if i could have waited and saved 100$ on my vid card

Originally Posted by InTheReview
http://www.bit-tech.net/images/review/371/doom3.png

Well thanks for choosing such different colours... it makes the review so easy to read for all us colour blind folk.

[/SARCASTIC RANT]

Otherwise a nice review. Thanks. :)

ch424

Originally Posted by ch424
Well thanks for choosing such different colours... it makes the review so easy to read for all us colour blind folk.

[/SARCASTIC RANT]

what colours would you like? Pink and Yellow? :|

or just something a little more contrasting? :?

j/k - the colours aren't all *that* contrasting - I will redo the graphs tomorrow morning ;)

Personally a bright green that is obviously nvidia would be preferable; correspondance between Green for Nvidia and Red for ATI would make the graphs a bit more readible without refreshing myself to see whos who. Good review though biggles; keep up the good work. ;)

What sort of pricing could we expect on this or was a reading too fast and missed it again?

I was looking at the 9800 pro but this might sway me a little when my next student loan comes through hehe

Originally Posted by Almightyrastus
What sort of pricing could we expect on this or was a reading too fast and missed it again?

I was looking at the 9800 pro but this might sway me a little when my next student loan comes through hehe

It should be priced around £150 - I've got an XFX retail sample here that is retailing at £160 iirc, but it's slightly overclocked.

In your review you used the NFSU2 demo and glossed over the fact NSFU2 is not only playable at 12fps you don't even realize it's that low. I have a GeForce FX 5900XT, which is a joke compared to the current midrange cards but I was playing NFSU2 with 8xS AA and 8 AF over riding the app control becuase it was still jaggy using the slider in the game, but I remeber 12fps being a slideshow not smooth and crisp. For perspective my still images are crisper than either of the two videocards screenies... One difference is I do have the retail game and have been playing since the 8th and never realizes the fps per sec were that low, but considering that it was built with the xbox and lesser consoles in mind the fps might be aimed at older hardware. The only reason I felt I need to post this is you claim to use real games for testing did you even play the game? I find it hard to see how you could have missed the fact the frame rate seems to have no impact on what you see? Maybe I'm missing something but then again I can't see how you got rid of the jaggies under 4x AA even with a rotaed grid they were really bad on my machine at 2x.

In case it matters my cpu is an amd mobile running at 2.2Ghz, but it shouldn't matter as I still only getting 12-14 fps which I would think would be unplayable. here's a link to the screen shot with fraps running:
12 fps lol &
another image

The blurred image on NFS:U2 on the 6600GT is probably down to the game itself, it looks alot like the problem that NFS:U1 had with ATI cards. Have you tryed disabling some of the filters (overbright, motion blur etc) to try and get around the issue?. In NFS:U1, the "blurring" was caused by either having motion blur or light trails on, both which also disabled AA in the game, even when forced through the ATI drivers.

Originally Posted by bigz

or just something a little more contrasting? :?

Yes please -- the green and red (at least I think they are :)) are hard to tell apart because they fade to black between them. If you used more a more obvious green (brighter), that would be great! ATM, they both look orange to me!

Thanks,

ch424

Originally Posted by HammeredCan
In your review you used the NFSU2 demo and glossed over the fact NSFU2 is not only playable at 12fps you don't even realize it's that low. I have a GeForce FX 5900XT, which is a joke compared to the current midrange cards but I was playing NFSU2 with 8xS AA and 8 AF over riding the app control becuase it was still jaggy using the slider in the game, but I remeber 12fps being a slideshow not smooth and crisp. For perspective my still images are crisper than either of the two videocards screenies... One difference is I do have the retail game and have been playing since the 8th and never realizes the fps per sec were that low, but considering that it was built with the xbox and lesser consoles in mind the fps might be aimed at older hardware.

I don't quite understand what you're saying... but I will make an assumption.

The image quality that you are seeing in the review are my implementation of the "best-playable" settings - these are subjective, but the frame rates aren't. You could have other opinions about what looks better - some prefer high AF and no AA, while some prefer lots of AA and a little AF - I've struck a balance between the two in this title, while keeping the frame rates at 100% playable levels. The minimum frame rate never drops below 30 frames per second, that is the most important frame rate, as it will determine how much "lag" you see - anything that goes below 25 fps can come across as noticeable lag.

The only reason I felt I need to post this is you claim to use real games for testing did you even play the game? I find it hard to see how you could have missed the fact the frame rate seems to have no impact on what you see? Maybe I'm missing something but then again I can't see how you got rid of the jaggies under 4x AA even with a rotaed grid they were really bad on my machine at 2x.

Yes, I don't just make numbers up for a living, you know.
:|

Originally Posted by bigz
The image quality that you are seeing in the review are my implementation of the "best-playable" settings - these are subjective, but the frame rates aren't. You could have other opinions about what looks better - some prefer high AF and no AA, while some prefer lots of AA and a little AF - I've struck a balance between the two in this title, while keeping the frame rates at 100% playable levels. The minimum frame rate never drops below 30 frames per second, that is the most important frame rate, as it will determine how much "lag" you see - anything that goes below 25 fps can come across as noticeable lag.

Also, at what point does bigz say that 12fps is acceptable? :? I'd say that you'd get a far better framerate if you turned the AA and AF down, it's absolutely killing your card. If you want to run high resolutions at a high image quality, get some newer hardware.

Oh, and please don't make me load any more uncompressed bitmaps :'(

thanks for that bigz and Etacovda, that is better than I was expecting on the pricing. Dropped a post it on my monitor as a gentle hint to see how generous people are hehehe

why wasnt HL2 one of the games used as a test? but no need to asnwer that just wanna know wht are the performance differences?

there is a HL2 article in progress - I wanted to finish the game before I could provide a good evaluation of HL2 game play on these video cards. ;)

Well, it better run hl2 well because im buying one whether it does or not :P

Never the less, the joys of a monitor that only does 60hz at 1280 means ill be stuck at 1024 where the performance should be great ;)

I am using....don't laugh.....a Geforce Ti 4200. I can play Far Cry, Half-life 2, Flatout and Unreal Tournament 2004 without any problems and HL2 looks amazing even on my card. NFS Underground 2 however seems to really hate my graphics card and runs like a dog no matter what I do, I even tried reducing nearly all the settings to minimum and running at 800x600 resolution. I know it has lots of whizzy effects (when I turn the setting up I can get a really pretty slide show going on) but it is taking the pee.
I haven't been this annoyed trying to play a game since Flatout blue screened me when I tried to run it. Yes, blue screen, full on death lock up! Designed for Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played, just not for your nvidia card mate, it's too old, get an upgrade! Turning off sun flares sorted that problem out.

Did you find even the cards tested had a harder time running NFS Underground 2 compared to the other games tested as I am curious to see if it has a poorly optimized game engine or if it is just that my card can't handle the effects.


AMD Athlon XP 2000+
512 DDR 400 Ram
Geforce 4 Ti 4200