The board and image quality

Board analysis

The GeForce 6600 GT reference card

SLI connector

The first aspect that really stands out on the GeForce 6600 GT reference board is its small size. In comparison to NVIDIA’s previous mainstream offerings, the GeForce FX 5900 XT and especially the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, the 6600 GT is tiny! You’ll also notice that an external power connection isn’t necessary – the PCI Express interface is capable of supplying GeForce 6600 GT with all the power it needs.

In comparison to other reference boards, the GeForce 6600 GT’s PCB is rather spartan. You’ll notice NVIDIA has significantly reduced the amount of power circuitry on the board, while a simple, single-slot ducted cooling design is used to keep the GeForce 6600 GT’s core cool. All this should help to keep production costs in check.

The GeForce 6600 GT is slightly longer than the X600 XT

The back of the 6600 GT

In operation, the GeForce 6600 GT board itself runs much cooler than GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and 5900 XT, despite its high clock speeds. Obviously the use of GDDR-3 memory helps here somewhat. Samsung’s 2.0ns modules were used on our reference board. These are the same modules used in GeForce 6800 GT. You’ll also note the SLI connector on the top of the card.

Image quality

While we plan on taking a closer look at image quality with the GeForce 6600 GT and NVIDIA’s ForceWare 65 driver later this month, we still wanted to take a quick look at both AA and AF:

GeForce 6600 GT AA disabled

GeForce 6600 GT 2xAA

GeForce 6600 GT 4xAA

X600 XT AA disabled

X600 XT 2xAA

X600 XT 4xAA

Notes

NVIDIA has adopted a rotated-grid sampling pattern for all GeForce 6 series GPUs, including the GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT. This new AA pattern has drastically improved the quality of NVIDIA’s anti-aliasing, an area ATI had held a decisive advantage over NVIDIA in the past. As you can see in our screenshots above, both company’s 4xAA mode looks very good, with each card having its strong areas over the other. NVIDIA’s 2xAA actually looks a little better overall than ATI’s:

RADEON X600 XT 2xAA




GeForce 6600 GT 2xAA

GeForce 6600 GT 4xAA AF off

6600 GT now with 4xAF

6600 GT 4xAA/8xAF

6600 GT 4xAA/16xAF

X600 XT 4xAA AF disabled

X600 XT 4xAA/4xAF

X600 XT 4xAA/8xAF

X600 XT 4xAA/16xAF