Overclocking and thoughts
OverclockingNV43 arrives in two flavours; regular vanilla 6600 and 6600 GT. The GT model is identical in every way except for core and RAM speeds of 500MHz/1000MHz, respectively. You'd think that core batches that have failed testing at 500MHz are destined for vanilla 6600 cards. That's what I thought until I inched the core up 10MHz at a time when trying to find the card's limit.
As you can see, I was inching up for a rather long time. 500MHz core, the 6600 GT's base clock, came and went with ease. General artifacts began appearing at a lofty 555MHz core. 545MHz was solid through a couple of 3DMark03 runs. It seems as if GALAXY has slipped in GT cores. It's a real shame that memory overclocking was so poor in comparison. Artifacts were clearly in evidence at just 590MHz. In the end, I settled for an overclocked speed of 545MHz core and 580MHz memory. The overclocked speed makes the card a little unbalanced in nature, with superb pixel-pushing and shading capabilities compromised by poor memory bandwidth.
Running DOOM 3 again at 1024x768 showed modest gains for such a core increase. I can't help feeling that mediocre bandwidth is to blame. That said, any stability above default speeds is a bonus.
Thoughts
I like NVIDIA's NV43 and I like GALAXY's GeForce 6600 card. What NVIDIA has done is harness current top-end technology into a GPU and card that, depending upon manufacturer and RAM arrangement, will cost between £90-£120. GALAXY's card comes in at the upper end of that scale, thanks to a healthy 256MB of onboard RAM. Looking at our benchmark numbers that include a few older titles, it's apparent that NV43 performance makes looking at previous generation's midrange cards, and I'm thinking of Radeon 9600s and GeForce 5700/5900 XTs, almost pointless. What's more, GALAXY's PCI-Express 6600 card doesn't require auxillary power and the GPU's fan is pretty damn quiet, although a few sacrifices have to be made for the cheaper NV43 part, as there's no SLI capability and a distinct lack of memory bandwidth from the 128-bit interface.
I expect GeForce 6600 performance to look even stronger when evaluated via shader-heavy titles and thus have little problem in recommending it as a GPU, especially if you're looking towards upgrading to PCI-Express motherboards imminently. NVIDIA is adamant that bridged AGP cards will be available shortly, too. GALAXY has done a decent enough job with its card, but, as mentioned previously, needs to brush up on the documentation side. The overall package represents good value at £120 or so. I'd definitely put it on a shortlist if your graphics card budget extends that far.
