Coo! There was only one page when I started reading this. They filled in as I read. :)

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lol me too! it's magic!

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wow. Are you planning to do this thing with any other cards?

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rofl at the incident with the gigabyte card.

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What quality settings were used in the games?

I am assuming that Doom 3 is in medium since these are 128MB cards.
I've read that there are some 6600GT 256MB cards coming out (Gigabyte GV-NX66T256D and MSI 6600GT-256E, maybe more) Please show us some tests with the 256MB models once they hit the streets (or if you know they are definately not, please tell us that too)

Even though the cards only have 128bit bus, wouldn't the extra ram help out in places like Doom 3 where texture quality is a matter of ram quantity? The local video ram still has to be faster than fetching it from system ram.


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I didn't see a single card in this review that didn't have a really cheesey looking fan...the type that might last a couple years if you're really lucky, but might last six months on some cards if you're not. The GeForce 6600GT is a decent card; for $175-250 (depending on PCIe or AGP) you'd think vendors would put a fan deserving of the price. My PNY 6800NU came with a squirrel-cage fan and super heavy heatsink that I know will last. Hopefully, Arctic Cooling will come out with an NV Silencer soon for the 6600 family; I wouldn't trust any of the fans I saw here to last.

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Great job on the quality control inspections of these cards D.W. Hopefully IHV's take notice and resolve these potentially damageing problems.

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Derek, the "enlarged images" all seem to be missing, or else the links are somehow broken. I tested with Firefox and IE6 and neither one would resolve the image links.

Other than that, *wow* - who knew HSFs could be such an issue? I'm quite surprised that they are only secured at two corners. Would it really have been that difficult to use four mount points? The long-term prospects for these cards are not looking too good.

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Something I've just realized: The Gigabyte NX66T256D is not a GT yet supports SLI. Are they using a GT that can't run at the faster speeds and selling it as a 6600 standard? It has 256MB.
We ordered two from a vendor who said it definately does SLI.

http://www.giga-byte.com/VGA/Products/Products_GV-NX66256D.htm#

Can you guys find out for sure?

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Very nice article, but any chance we could get a part 2 with any replacement cards the manufacturers send and I'd like the see the Pine card reviewed too. It's being advertised as the Anandtech Deal at the top of this article and has dual dvi like the XFX card. Kind of odd one of the only cards not reviewed gets a big fat buy me link.

To me it seems that with the 6600GT/6800 series Nvidia has their best offering since the Geforce4 TI's...I'm sure I'm not the only one still hanging on to my Ti4600.



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