More BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC

Other extras include a pair of DVI outputs, unique in that most other cards only come with one DVI output and another VGA port. BFG bundles a pair of VGA adapters, though, should you wish to connect a pair of analog displays. The option for two digital flat panels alone will certainly sell a number of these cards.

There’s also a video output interface for connecting a bundled dongle. The dongle has outputs for component video, S-video, and composite video. You’ll need to come up with the requisite cables, though.

Dual-DVI, nice

Look ma, no power input

SLI, if you have to have it

As with other PCI Express-based 6600 GT cards, BFG’s supports SLI multi-rendering technology, which makes it possible to connect two GeForce 6600 GT OC cards together and run them cooperatively. Although it’s a fairly significant feature, I wouldn’t be the first person to recommend against running 6600 GT’s in SLI. The cards are too expensive in pairs and don’t offer enough performance to justify the cost. A better solution would be a single GeForce 6800 GT, which of course can be SLI’ed down the road as well.

Because the GeForce 6600 GT s manufactured on a 110nm process, features eight pixel pipelines, and only 128MB of memory, it falls within the power envelope for PCI Express and consequentially doesn’t need an auxiliary power connector. BFG still recommends that you pair it with at least a 350W power supply, though.

There's a blue LED under there

The output dongle

Other aesthetic differences between the BFG card and NVIDIA’s reference model include a circular copper heatsink and copper ram-sinks. The translucent fan is very quiet--a pleasant departure from the tiny fan used on ATI’s X700, which spins extremely fast and is quite loud in comparison. Three LED elements sit below the fan, casting a bright blue light when the power is on.

Overclocking

As it turns out, there seems to be quite a bit of headroom in TSMC’s 110nm manufacturing process, as the BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC scaled well up to nearly 600MHz. Optimal performance was a bit lower though, so we eventually settled on an outstanding 570MHz/1.15GHz. At those speeds we were able to test Doom 3 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF and still score 31.5 frames per second.