It really is starting to become a nasty trend, it was only a few hours before the actual launch that I received the final data for NVIDIA's new products. This left me with only a few hours to quickly write up something about their new mid-range products. Oh well, must not complain... I'll take it, let's get started!

NVIDIA today is releasing their GeForce series 6600, basically slowly eliminating the GeForce 5x00 series. NVIDIA has been developing this product under the codename NV43. Quite clever as they are now pushing the advanced Shader Model 3.0 architecture into the mid-range section, which is completely empty.

The downside for the most of you... at first this will be a 100% PCI-Express series. As you can see, the graphics industry is going to slowly force PCI-Express mainboards upon you. I'm not quite sure when an AGP version is planned*.

* update - likely in October we will see AGP versions.

The GeForce 6600 series is going to be the new mid-range product. Combine the strong and full shader power of the Series 6800 with a cut down pipeline and slower memory and there it is, a price competitive product range.

Let's have a look at what we can expect. In the new GeForce 6600 range we will see two products initially, namely the GeForce 6600 and the GeForce 6600 GT. Both cards will have 8 pixel pipelines and will be equipped with 128-bit memory. The GT version is of course slightly faster but here's an interesting fact, it will also be SLI compatible. Well, you might as well buy a high-end 6800 then but still...

GeForce 6600 GT cards come with a 500 MHz clock and memory rate, 128-bit (GDDR3, 128 MB) and will cost $200-230, GeForce 6600 with 128-bit bus (GDDR, 128 MB) will cost $150. According to preliminary results and unconfirmed tests GeForce 6600 GT performs 20% better than RADEON 9800XT.

Let's place the 6x00 products in a little overview: