Chaintech GeForce SA6600G (6600 GT)

Manufacturer: Chaintech
Supplied by: Chaintech
Price: $189.00

by Dean Barker  (2/11/2004)

Introduction

The NVidia 6800 line are fantastically fast products we all lust after.  Unfortunately, a large number of us can’t drop down three to five hundred dollars on a video card.  This is the main reason for the success of the midrange VGA market.  The midrange cards are aimed squarely at the average user with the average budget.  Many of us have been drooling over the GeForce 6600 GT since its release but while the card is reasonably priced, it has thus far required a PCI-Express equipped board to be put into use.  The middle of the road user hasn’t quite migrated over to PCI-E mainboards, LGA775, DDR2 and the like.  AGP cards, even with their end being in sight, are very much alive and well.  Because of this, NVidia has put out an AGP version of its highly successful 6600 card.  The AGP version is priced a bit higher ($10 give or take) as it requires a High Speed Interconnect (HSI) bridge chip to link the PCI-E interface it was designed for to an AGP 8X interface for mainstream fraggers.  Aside from a slightly higher price the only other difference in producing this card in AGP form has from its PCI-E sibling is a slightly reduced memory bandwidth; 14.4 GB/sec as opposed to the 16.0 GB/sec of the PCI-E version.

Today, we have our first look at an AGP version of the GeForce 6600 GT here at the OCC.  Thanks to the good folks at Chaintech, let’s take a few minutes to cover this newest midrange VGA burner and see what you get and how it performs. 

Specifications

• Powered by GeForce 6600 GPU (NV43)

• 8-pipe GPU Architecture

• 0.11 Micron Process Technology

• 128-bit Memory Interface

• 256-bit graphics architecture

• Core clock speed of 500 MHz

• Memory clock speed of 900 MHz

• 128mb DDR3 SDRAM

• AGP 8X interface

• 64-bit floating point texture filtering and blending

• 375 Million verticals/sec

• 4.0 Billion texels/sec fill rate

• 14.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth

• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 3.0 engine

• NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II technology

• NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 3.0 technology

• NVIDIA® High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering technology

• NVIDIA® ForceWare™ Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)

• NVIDIA® nView™ multi-display technology

• NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0

• 400MHz RAMDACs supports 2048x1536 resolution at 85Hz

• DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG2 decoding support

• Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder up to 1024*768 resolution 

• DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5 optimizations and support

NEXT
 

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Setup and Benchmarking
Pg 4 - Benchmarking Results
Pg 5 - Benchmarking Results
Pg 6 - Overclocking and Conclusion