Introduction

NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT is without a doubt, the mainstream card that’s getting most of the buzz right now at the $200 price point. ATI’s X700 XT was launched with much fanfare back in September, but up until now shipping retail cards have been practically impossible to find. This has given NVIDIA a window of opportunity which they’ve exploited by providing plentiful supplies of the GeForce 6600 GT, as well as 128MB and 256MB models of GeForce 6600, which features the same 8-pixel pipeline architecture of the GeForce 6600 GT, only with slower memory and core clocks and less expensive TSOP DDR memory modules.

We’ve begun gathering up GeForce 6600 GT AGP cards from Leadtek, XFX, and others, but what we’ve decided to do today was take a closer look at overclocking the GeForce 6600 GT AGP, to see what kind of extra performance we can extract in a variety of games. To see how the GeForce 6600 GT AGP fared against other popular AGP cards out there, we’ve also included the RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB, as well as the RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce 6800. We were particularly curious to see how close our overclocked GeForce 6600 GT could come to the $300 GeForce 6800. If the 6600 GT AGP can come within a few percentage points of the more expensive GeForce 6800, it would be an even more enticing upgrade option for consumers.

The GeForce 6600 GT core has proven to be an excellent overclocker, we hit a core clock speed of 558MHz and memory clock of 515MHz (1.03GHz effective), so we’re hoping for positive results. Let’s take a look at the results!

System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz

ABIT IC7-G MAX 2 Advance

1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2

ATI RADEON 9800 XT
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB
Driver version CAT 4.12 beta

NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT reference card
Leadtek WinFast A400 GeForce 6800 card
Driver version 67.02

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
Far Cry 1.2 (custom demo for mp_jungle, SM2.0b and SM3.0 paths used)
DOOM 3 (gameplay custom demo)