Bundle and presentation
A package is more than just a card. Let's see how GALAXY does in the bundle and accessories stakes.
Pleasant enough, really, and it makes a welcome change from boxes that try to wow the enthusiast with over-the-top designs. The GALAXY GeForce 6600 is a small card in comparison to its 6800 stablemates, and the box is refreshingly petite.
I hope you weren't expecting an ASUS-like compendium of CDs. I mentioned in the company's GeForce 6800 review that it seriously needs to work on augmenting the basic instruction manual. We see the same brief multi-language, multi-card manual shipped here. There's absolutely no reason why accompanying literature should be anything other than excellent. This is an area that I hope GALAXY improves markedly in the next few months. There's some consolidation with the bundling of a full version of MotoGP - Ultimate Racing Technology 2. There's also the obligatory DVD software player - PowerDVD 5 in this case. Hardware-wise, there's a DVI dongle, S-Video cable, and an S-Video-to-RCA convertor. All standard fare.
The driver CD has been bumped up to version 19 due to newer drivers required for the GeForce 6600 line. It's a small point, but GALAXY could at least spell NVIDIA's driver set, ForceWare, correctly. There's also the latest iteration of DirectX, a handy overclocking tool which is just Coolbits in disguise.
Detonator XP 66.31 drivers aren't so different from the WHQL-approved 61.77 set
Default clocks are 324MHz core and 552MHz RAM. I can tell you that the core went much, much higher. Read on to see just how high.