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Installation

     Installing the 6600GT is a breeze, and there was absolutely nothing that was hard about it except for the fact that you may want to unplug your power supply before installing the card. On occasion installing hardware may cause your system to boot up causing catastrophic failure. Of course if you're reading this you may have already known that. Other then the physical installation, Joytech has included a copy of WinDVD Creator, and the nVidia driver. The second disk quickly became a drink coaster since you're probably better off just downloading the newest driver from nVidia anyways...

Performance

     The performance of the 6600GT wasn't totally staggering in the synthetic benchmarks, but gaming performance was above par and about the same if not better then some offering that are twice the cost. It is rather odd that a card that can perform roughly one-half of the competition can actually match it in certain games such as Call of Duty and Doom 3. As of right now the only real platform available that isn't in short supply is that of the Intel Pentium 4 variety, so we used a LGA775 2.8e for our testing on our previous review test bed consisting of the following components.

Foxconn 925XE7AA
Intel Pentium 4 2.8E LGA775 w/retail HSF
PC Toyz 520W Power Supply
Crucial Ballistix PC2-5300
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200gb SATA HD

     One other thing we wanted to incorporate into our little testing session was the aspect of how much does overclocking a video card really help in frame rates? We found that in the synthetic benchmarks it helped out quite a lot whereas in our gaming benchmarks processor power was the key, so we decided to include both so you can get some idea of what's really going on... ;) Our card was a weird clocker, it wanted to run fast when we used nVidia's find optimal settings, but after about ten minutes artifacts were readily apparent, yet the card just kept on running. Very odd that nVidia would go through the trouble of creating such a utility to save card owners from frying their cards, yet it was malfunctional. If I paid cold hard cash for my card I wouldn't be too happy about it frying my card. Luckily, we closely monitored the card during our benchmarking session and turned it down before it got out of control and damaged the memory.

     Using nVidia's utility the card would go to 1140ghz on the memory quite easily but we found that after about ten minutes the card would artifact like crazy. We turned it down until we found that 1050mhz was the farthest it would go without hurting it. Whether this is a driver problem or simply inherit in 6600GT's we aren't sure. We have been able to trust nVidia's utility in previous cards such as the FX series without this kind of problem. If anyone else can verify this as a problem with 6600GT's feel free to let us know. Its too good of a card to let nVidia cancel out...

Synthetic Gaming

     As you can see 3Dmark 2001 SE is still a very system oriented benchmark whereas 2003 and 2005 are very focused on video. With our P4 at 3.5Ghz the default speed of 2.8Ghz beats it out when the 6600GT is overclocked in 2003 and 2005, yet in 2001SE system speed is more focused much like it is in actual games.

Gaming Benchmarks

     The Doom 3 frame rates were very competitive with the best out there, and the Call Of Duty benchmarks are incredible! The only disappointment was in Aquamark 3 where we think its a PCI-E bus problem which is rumored to be overhauled soon. (probably with the NF-4 motherboards). You may also notice that in UT 2004 that the CPU seemed to be bottlenecking. The 6600GT seems to be properly matched for today's and tomorrows CPU numbers from the apparent bottlenecking in this bench.

     The 6600GT seems like kind of an orphan. Even though it is apparently geared to run against ATI's up and coming x800 series, and the AGP version is geared towards replacing the Radeon 9800 Pro. We have to honestly disagree with these claims, although the card is very fast. It seems as though it was ATI beat with some of the mainstream games such as Doom 3, whereas we've seen very high numbers with the 9800 Pro on some of the older games. The numbers on Call of Duty are puzzling, since it is using a modified Q3 engine which would be considered as old by some and the best by others, but it is indeed an older game, yet the 6600GT runs it like a freight train! This card is an excellent value card, and with some better cooling it is sure to appeal to those of you out there wanting to get the most band for your buck. ClubOC recommended!