Page 17
The Verdict
I'm pleasantly surprized with what Galaxy did with this product. The GeForce 6600 series by itself offers astoundingly good value for your money. The GT versions bring you a little bit more of a complementary experience over the generic 6600 and due to standard higher clock frequencies, this Galaxy product will bring you even better performance over the competition that follow NVIDIA's reference design's clock frequency settings. In layman's wording: it runs slightly faster.
The 6600 GT is brings you a bit of a reserve for the more heavy tasks and/or AA and AF settings and options. In the end the 6600 GT is the best product to buy in the mid-range segment of the graphics market as it is today.
To be able to get a PCI-Expresss graphics core running on an AGP platform NVIDIA used their HSI bridge, it does not compromise in performance at all, it's not a bottleneck and it can manage the data load without any issues.
Let's talk about game performance, first Doom 3. At a screen resolution of 1024x768 you'll be able to play this new title at tight high quality settings with an average of 67 Frames per second, at 1600x1200 it still plays at 46 FPS, that is extremely playable people. Far Cry then, at the highest possible Image Quality settings did 50+ FPS while it manages to maintain high performance at a 1600x1200 resolution with an average of 40 FPS. Again, that's really something considering it's running at the best possible image quality settings.
The cooling does it's job quite nicely. Cooling itself is not at a level of extremely high performance airflow but it's more than sufficient and most of all very silent. Oh and it's a lovely cooling design to look at. Whatever the reason was for our failing overclocking attempts I do not know. At this point Galaxy is getting the benefit of the doubt as they guarantee me this card can do a 575 MHz overclock on the core and 1250 Mhz on the memory. They are very keen that this product is an awesome overclocking piece of gear. I'll brief you more on that in an update of this article!
So here you have this AGP 8x product with great performance, is 100% stable in an AGP 8x configuration, offers dualview, the latest 3D feature set including Shader Model 3.0, offers HDTV output and in general offers anything you expect from a good graphics cards these days. So it boil down to this, if you can't afford a high-end product or simply do not have the ambition to own one, then this card is a spectacular product to get.Galaxy did an awesome job with their GeForce 6600 GT AGP, you can't deny this in any possible way. Galaxy needs to focus a bit more on their software bundle though as it is getting slightly outdated. Other then that this product is getting my 
Two thumbs up, and I highly recommended it. For it's higher then average performance and daring cooling design I will grant this product an editor's choice award.
Name: Galaxy 6600 GT AGP 128 MB
Description: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 8 pixel pipeline based graphics card
Info: Galaxy TechnologyPrice: ~200 EUR
Guru3D.com Cheapest Prices for
GeForce 6800 128MB
GeForce 6800 LE 256MB
GeForce 6800 GT 128MB
GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
GeForce 6600 128 MB (PCX)
GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (AGP)
GeForce 6600 128 MB (PCX)
GeForce 6200 128 MB
Seek best price on Guru3D.com pricewatch, click here.
