Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH

Leadtek is one of NVIDIA’s oldest board partners, with products dating all the way back to NVIDIA’s RIVA 128 series of graphics chips. In fact, Leadtek is one of the oldest companies in this roundup, enoying Tier One board partner status with NVIDIA. Leadtek has traditionally catered their graphics cards towards the high-end crowd, with boards that differ from NVIDIA’s stock reference design. It was Leadtek that championed the cause of superior 2D quality in the GeForce 3 days when many other manufacturers were skimping in this regard, while their GeForce4 cards featured massive coolers – in fact their GeForce4 Ti 4400 and Ti 4600 cards were both cooled by dual fans! Leadtek took their cooling system even further for GeForce FX 5900 Ultra by adding copper and making other enhancements (earning our Editor’s Choice Award in the process), while their GeForce 6800 Ultra card also featured copper cooling and overclocked stock speeds and was another Editor’s Choice product.

It’s because of this that we were a bit surprised to see an aluminum-based cooler at the heart of the WinFast A6600 GT TDH when we opened its box. Leadtek’s Orb-shaped cooler put up respectable numbers though, its idle temperature registered in at 40 degrees Celsius, while load testing with 3DMark 2003 yielded one of the lowest recorded temperatures at 61 degrees, second only to the BFG card. Leadtek’s cooling unit did all this quietly, only the ASUS and MSI cards were quieter in operation – taken as a whole not a bad overall performance for such a mundane-looking cooler. We were also a bit surprised to see that Leadtek skipped the dust filter on the WinFast A6600 GT TDH. Leadtek has been providing dust filters with their cards for some time now, sitting just above the card’s fan.

Dust is one of the fan’s biggest culprits. Too much dust can cause the fan’s motor to die prematurely, which is why Leadtek’s dust filter was such a nice addition. Leadtek may have decided to remove it to help lower noise levels; the filters on some user’s cards were a little loose, causing excessive vibration and thus more noise. (The problem could be easily solved by tightening the filter with a small Philips screwdriver.) Whatever the case, we hope to see Leadtek reincorporate the dust filter on their future mainstream cards, as it was a fine feature.


Like ASUS, eVGA, and MSI, Leadtek has chosen to stick with NVIDIA’s reference clock speeds of 500MHz core/450MHz memory for their WinFast A6600 GT TDH card. All three cards also ship with the conventional DVI/VGA combination as well. Leadtek outfits their card with one of the better game bundles in this roundup by including the DVD version of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, two popular Ubisoft titles from 2004. Leadtek also bundles a power adapter, DVI adapter, and HDTV output with the WinFast A6600 GT TDH.