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PCI-Express
PCI Express is a new development in I/O interconnect standard that companies like NVIDIA, ATI and many others will deploy in future graphics solutions. Basically it's going to replace the traditional AGP bus in the next year or two. NVIDIA won't be releasing GPUs with native PCI Express initially, but will rely on bridged solutions to handle the translation from the multiple serial busses to the card's native AGP interface. NVIDIA calls their bridge-chip the HSI, High Speed Interconnect. With up to 4GB/s of one-directional and 8GB/s of concurrent bandwidth, users are free to have high-speed graphics output. PCI Express significantly increases bandwidth between the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU). We are not yet 100% sure if Series 6600 uses HSI or is a native solution. The differences between ATI and NVIDIA (NVIDIA HSI/ ATI Native) can be discussed and argued. As far as I'm concerned it just doesn't matter as long as it works okay.

PCI-Express mainboard

Remember the good old days, years ago...  3dfx's Voodoo2 in SLI mode? Scan Line Interleave, configuration. No? Basically you take two graphics cards, each card renders half of the image scan lines, which resulted in double the performance of a single board.

When we look back the years we can see that not one manufacturer has come up with a similar concept (set aside the XGI Volari Dual Core products) for one simple reason... AGP, there's no dual AGP solution at hand and PCI does not have the bandwidth to handle modern graphics accelerators.

Now that PCI-Express is here, things have changed for the better. Motherboards featuring the Tumwater chipset will have dual PCI-E-x16 slots making dual graphics accelerators a possibility again. NVIDIA steps up to the plate today with the re-introduction of the SLI concept on the GeForce 6800 series, again using the SLI moniker but now with a different approach to the same principles that made Voodoo2 SLI a big success. As stated 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 in that case but still... I wouldn't mind a 4 monitor desktop :)

Next to doubling performance, 1-2-3 yes... 4 monitors can be connected. This only can be done with the GT version though.

Architecture Characteristics of the GeForce 6 Series

• Pixel pipelines: 16 / 12 / 8
• Superscalar shader: Yes
• Pixel shader operations/pixel: 8
• Pixel shader operations/clock: 128
• Pixel shader precision: 32 bits
• Single texture pixels/clock: 16
• Dual texture pixels/clock: 8
• Adaptive Anisotropic Filtering: Yes
• Z-stencil pixels/clock: 32

Let's talk compare a little, the GeForce 6600 series has manufacturered at 0.11µ where I expected it to be 0.13 µ!

Get ready for the most vibrant, lifelike, and elegant graphics ever experienced on a PC. The groundbreaking NVIDIA® GeForce 6 Series of graphics processing units (GPUs) and their revolutionary technologies power worlds where reality and fantasy meet; worlds in which new standards are set for performance, visual quality, realism, and video functionality. The GeForce 6 Series GPUs deliver powerful, elegant graphics to drench your senses, immersing you in unparalleled worlds of visual effects for the ultimate PC experience.

GeForce 6600GT cards come with a 500 MHz cock and memory rate, 128-bit (GDDR3, 128 MB) and will cost $/EUR229, GeForce 6600 with 128-bit bus (GDDR, 128 MB) will cost $150 and has a way lower 300 MHz core clock. The memory clock is something that can be decided by the manufacturer. I have had these clockspeeds confirmed today with NVIDIA.