The Verdict
You have to admit, what Galaxy offers here is quite a lot of bang for you bucks. I wouldn't state that it's the best card versus the money, but 200 bucks for the GT model is a little too much for quite a few of you. No, for 150 bucks (and probably much cheaper in e-tail) the regular 6600 is a very nice product. You'll play any game released to date without any issues at all. If you try the newest titles you'll slowly get stuck on 1024x768 though, but even then you'll be able to play around with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing settings. And for roughly 150 bucks that's not bad at all. Initially when I read ther specs of this card I was a little leery about performance, I really disliked that core frequency, but it's not at all bad is it? Overclocking then... the core overclock speed was really amazing, I can't remember ever doing a 200 MHz overclock on any product, the first time I saw it I was very much in disbelieve. Sure it's no guarantee that you'll be able to achieve the same results. But most reviews around the globe show similar behavior. So grab Coolbits or Rivatuner and get started. I have to admit, the best overclocking results are always shown best with products that are limited somehow. And this product shows that very well.
The choice of 128-bit memory hurt the card when using hefty AA/AF choices though. The 256 MB helps a little yet 128 MB with faster memory would have been a bettter choice in my opinion. Higher resolutions are showing a big drop in performance. It'll have a rough time in there. But when we look at resolutions up to 1024x768 or even 1280x1024 combined with hefty shaders, well then the GPU is way more important and this particular GPU is based on that extraordinary power that we recognized in the 6800 series.
I have to say that I like what Galaxy is delivering here. We see a very cost effective product, with the cool blue PCB and the nice cooper cooling, which by the way is not at all loud. It's doesn't need to be connected to your PSU (PCI-Express version)
So the question you should ask yourself is this: do you play your games at 1280x1024 or higher? This might be this years perfect product for a particular buyer that doesn't have a whole lot to spend on graphics cards yet still would like to enjoy the latest games in an enjoyable framerate with awesome image quality. Doom 3 did an average 50 frames per second in 1024x768 resolution set at high-quality. That's just staggering for a product with this pricetag.
So in short, if your budget isn't sky-high... well put this product on your wish list as you'll definitely enjoy it.
Name: Galaxy 6600 256 MB
Description: NVIDIA 6600 8 Pixel pipeline base graphics card
Info: Galaxy Technology
Price: 160 EUR
Guru3D.com Cheapest Prices for
GeForce 6600 128MB
GeForce 6600 256MB
GeForce 6600 GT 128MB
GeForce 6800 128MB
GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
GeForce 6800 Ultra
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