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The 6600 GT card tested today will be offered in 128 and 256 MB configurations, you'll likely go for the 256 MB version, we however received the 128 MB model. Let's have a look at NVIDIA's GeForce Series 6 product line:
| GeForce 6600 | GeForce 6600 GT | GeForce 6800 | GeForce 6800 GT | GeForce 6800 Ultra | |
| Codename | NV43 | NV43 | NV40 | NV40GT | NV40U |
| Transistors | ? | ? | 222 million | ||
| Process, GPU maker | 110nm | 110nm | 130nm, IBM | ||
| Core clock | 300 MHz | 500 MHz | Up to 400 MHz | 350MHz | 400-450 MHz |
| Memory | 128MB DDR1 | 128MB GDDR3 | 128MB DDR1 | 256MB GDDR3 | 256MB GDDR3 |
| Memory bus | 64/128-bit | 256-bit | |||
| Memory clock | Up to manufacturer | 2x500 MHz | 2 x 350MHz | 2 x 500MHz | 2 x 600MHz |
| PCB | P212 | P212 | P2?? | P210 | P210 |
| Pipelines | 8 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 16 |
| FP operations | FP16, FP32 | ||||
| DirectX | DirectX 9.0c | ||||
| Pixel shaders | PS 3.0 | ||||
| Vertex shaders | VS 3.0 | ||||
| OpenGL | 1.5+ (2.0) | ||||
| Estimated Price | $120 | $179 | $199 | $299 | $399 |
| Availability | Now | Now | Now | ||
A product for any budget, that's what NVIDIA is offering. As you can see from the table above, NVIDIA is more than happy with the Series 6 graphics processor, they announced Series 6 in April 2004 and look what still is saturating the retail and OEM market. Quite startling. As you have noticed, the GeForce 6600 GT cards come with a 500 MHz clock and memory rate, 128-bit (GDDR3, 128 MB) with a suggested price tag of 199 bucks. The standard GeForce 6600 will also come with that 128-bit bus (GDDR, 128/256 MB), will cost about $150 and has a way lower yet more overclockable ~300 MHz core clock.
The GeForce 6600 product line has 8 Pixel pipelines and 3 Vertex processors that are confirmed to be working 100% with Rivatuner. The 6600 series can write only four color pixels per clock and has a fragment crossbar. The NV43 does appear to have eight pixel shader/texture units, so its not an "8 x 1" design or a "4 x 2" design. It's more of a hybrid and works quite well.
This Dual BIOS version of the 6600 GT will become available in both AGP and PCI-Express versions. Notable is the fact that it has two Dual DVI outputs and is a pure copper cooled graphics card.
It is designed specifically for overclockers. If you look down to photo's you'll notice an additional switch. Now say you want to overclock or fool around with the BIOS to get some pretty interesting overclocking results eh? You can do that now risk free. If you fail miserably with your overclock, you simply flip the switch and the card is hardwired to the second backup BIOS. Once you boot up you can flash BIOS A to B again and start over and over until you are satisfied. A pretty interesting idea.
The Hard- and Software
In the box we see a below average software bundle. You'll receive a driver CD plus your complementary selection of cables in the form of a S-Video and Composite cable. Of course you'll also get a bracket, which holds a switch for BIOS selection, a manual and of course the GeForce 6600 GT graphics card. As it seems every penny was saved to get the price on this product down.When we look more closer at the card the we see that card is overclocked at default for you a little. The core is 25 MHz faster compared to the standard 500 MHz NVIDIA reference clock. The same goes for the memory as it has been clocked at 1.12 GHz where the standard reference clock is 1 Ghz. So at default you'll already get a little more extra performance for free, which is good.
Dual BIOS then as that's what it's all about. Galaxy offers you the standard DOS based Flash tool from NVIDIA to flash the BIOS with the help of a small batch file. What however boggles my mind a little is that they do not offer the software to actually modify the BIOS.
So Galaxy introduces this product to the tweakers... yet they do not really want you to tweak the product. hmmm. I say tweakers because for the average user the BIOS backup/retore procedure is far too user unfriendly. This stuff is only for the more advanced users. We'll show you all of this over the next few pages.
Last thing that is notable on this card is a Buzzer Alarm. Galaxy SMART-FLASH card has built in a buzzer alarm. At default settings, the alarm will go off to warn user when the fan stops rotating or if the temperature sensor detected too high a GPU temperature (~75 Degrees C I believe). There is a jumper on the PCB that allows you to enable or disable the buzzer alert, disconnect the jumper if you want to disable the buzzer alert.
The Galaxy 6600 GT plus its bundle.
