Page 1

Galaxy 6600 GT AGP 128 MBDescription: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 8 pixel pipeline based graphics card AGP 4x/8x compatible
Info: Galaxy Technology
Price: ~210 EUR

Weeks ago when NVIDIA released the GeForce 6600 series, I heard a lot of moaning and groaning coming from traditional AGP users. They were stunned that NVIDIA had not released this graphics card for their AGP. Many simply figured this product would directly compete with NVIDIA's own products, namely the GeForce FX series. In fact it does. But NVIDIA is smart, they knew that this would be an extremely popular product for the Christmas season. They had the ability to do mass volume production and they went for it. They just needed a solution. See, it was never NVIDIA's intention to release a PCI-Express version of the 6600 only. They just needed a little more time to manage a stable fix to make a PCI-Express product work on the AGP bus...

The solution is implementing an additional chip, known as the High Speed Interconnect (HSI) bridge chip, on the graphics card making it backwards compatible from PCI-Express to AGP. Very few people believed this could be done before Christmas, including myself. They did it though. A week or thee ago, you were able to read our reference review and guess what? Last week the first retail GeForce 6600 GT AGP card arrived in our office. Today's product comes from Galaxy. It's the GT version of the card, the best bang for your bucks graphics card in the mid-end range of videocards in December 2004.

I know you guys are ready to get this card and good news, it's shipping throughout the world as we speak and slowly becoming available. This is a card that offers a lot of features and performance for a very reasonable amount of money; the GeForce 6600 range is economically priced and offers truly first-rate value for your money.

Within the GeForce 6600 range we see a large number of products though, slightly mystifying and for some confusing, as within that mid-range lineup we again see a top to bottom range. In essence between 100 and 230 USD you'll notice about 6-7 different 6600 models. The product you'll want to steer clear of is the one marked with 64-bit memory. Memory bandwidth is extremely crucial and a very important factor for performance. That 64-bit version will have effectively halved performance over the 128-bit models. Today's merchandise is in that upper region of that mid-range. The GeForce 6600 GT is possibly my favorite product from the mid-range segment and it really doesn't matter whether that is the PCI-Express or AGP 8x version as our benchmarks and tests will show you.

Quite honestly

Cute huh?

Let's have a quick overview of the Series 6 products from NVIDIA and then talk a little about features and technology. Next we'll show you a photo shoot, followed by overclocking, benchmarks/tests and of course we'll be concluding with "the verdict" on this product.