Gigabyte 3D1 (Dual GPU 6600GT)

Graphics cards 1054 Page 1 of 16 Published by

teaser

Page 1

A Twin IntroductionSeries: GV-3D1
More info: Gigabyte
MSRP: 499 EUR / 599 USD (Including GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard valued at 175 USD)

Seek the best price here.

Dual GPU based GeForce 6600GT -3D1 @ Guru3D.comSomewhere in December I received a press-release from Gigabyte. First glimpse of the press-release: 3D1. That reminded me somehow of a song, which title I just can't seem to remember. Then the first look at the image, oh crap, there are actually two graphics cores on that thing, finally someone did it! Yay!

Ever since that very moment a lot of people are having 3dfx Voodoo flashbacks, since Gigabyte announced this dual GPU product. Dual 6600 GT's on one card, that's cool just by the looks of it. Back in 1999 we noticed that 3dfx had a huge success with pairing 2 Voodoo2 cards with a SLI cable. And although the technology is somewhat difference, NVIDIA decided to pick up that trend (as they bought the patent when they took over 3dfx) and go beyond everyone's expectations. The deal about placing two GPU's however always has been tricky. I say this specifically because others have tried and failed, think about the Rage Fury Maxx and XGI's Volari Duo V8.

NVIDIA's SLI is a hit though, when I talk to friends (gamers) they all know, heard and talk about it. In fact most of them are thinking about buying a SLI based combination, which I find  very interesting to hear because I did not expect to see this technology hit mainstream.

But ehm let's take it a step further with the 3D1. How about two of these dual-gpu cards in SLI, huh? Aah, no sorry. That is just not possible. This my friends is a dual 6600GT card built with 256MB DDR III memory. The 3D1's two processors communicate through NVIDIA's SLI interface and achieves over 14,000 points in 3DMark2003, according to our tests. That my friends is even more then the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra.

As should be clear by now, the card has two 6600 GT chips on it and has a 590 MHz (2x) memory frequency and a 500 MHz core on both GPU's. You can say at the least that I'm excited about innovation like this.

Well now, to be able to test it we finally jumped the SLI wagon. To make a nice assessment on this lovely SLI madness we equipped ourselves with a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard and an Athlon 64 4000+ processor. We had to opt for this nForce4 SLI mainboard as the 3D1 card unfortunately only works on this particular mainboard (in SLI mode that is). In fact, you can only buy this card in combo with the mainboard. It's an awesome combo though, priced at sub 500 USD.

Of course we are going to review the mainboard also, but this review will purely focus on the performance of the graphics card.

Copyright 2005 - Guru3D.com

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print