Nathan Davis was so impressed that he needed an extra pair of pants to finish this review.
Significantly cut down from the 6800, the 6600 range has eight pixel pipelines instead of twelve or sixteen and 128-bit memory instead of 256-bit. It's also lacking vertex shaders in comparison to ATI's offering, but that hardly bothers this card. With Shader Model 3.0 in the pipes, it continues to thwart even the X800 PRO. Being a GT, it has the SLI expansion option, making way for a longer, pants-dropping lifespan. And that's always acceptable around these parts.
The 6600GT's slaughter doesn't stop with Gigabyte. Holding this final retail model in our sweaty hands, we had our test bench fitted out with an i925X motherboard, a Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Here, it steamed on with some damn good results, not unlike that already seen in John's brain-wrecking preview of the card. It returned 7756 3DMarks for 3DMark03, 55.1fps in Doom 3 at 1280 x 1024 and a tantalising 56.7fps in our Bunker test of Far Cry. Luckily we had a box of four-ply Kleenexes handy.
The sound of the fan on this card is barely audible. So, suiting a system out with two of these babies for some SLI action wouldn't be a case of 'Yargh, where be mah bleedin' ears?'
It's inexpensive, but it's definitely not only for the budget conscious gamer, as this card boots royal arsery - anchor, chain and ship. And whale. It's cheap and with feisty performance on future-proof hardware, it hardly gets better than this.
If you can't afford an expensive deluxe card, this will more than suffice until you can, theoretically at least, double the performance with SLI. Too simple. It's a darned good chip and packed with a component/S-Video break-out box and a full copy of Doom 3.
Gigabyte has put together an excellent bundle with its GeForce 6600 GT. This is that rare, tasty treat we've been waiting to wolf down.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012