Date:
Sunday , March 06, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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MSI and XFX 6600 GT AGP and PCI-E

We report on our gaming experience with MSI’s 6600 GT PCI-Express and XFX’s 6600 GT AGP and PCI-Express video cards. New games used include Chronicles of Riddick and Everquest II.

Grammatical & Spelling Editor: Timothy Daniel

Introduction:

The NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT is being recognized by gamers everywhere as the top choice for mainstream graphics performance at an affordable price. The GeForce 6600 GT GPU is packed full of advanced features such as Shader Model 2.0 and 3.0, OpenEXR support with a FP16 framebuffer, FP16/32, Ultrashadow II, and Pure Video. In addition to those features, an 8 pixel-pipeline architecture with 3 vertex units, a 128-bit memory bus with fast GDDR3, and a high GPU clock speed provide you with very competitive performance in the latest games. You can read our preview of the technology behind the GeForce 6600 series here.

The GeForce 6600 GT is currently available on both the AGP and PCI-Express platforms. The GeForce 6600 GT GPU is a native PCI-Express GPU. Therefore, to make it work in an AGP slot, NVIDIA must use a High Speed Interconnect (HSI) chip on the video card to convert the PCI-Express signal to an AGP8X signal. Most add-in-board partners are offering both the AGP and PCI-Express versions. Some are even offering incentives such as higher core clock speeds or higher memory speeds in specially configured models to appeal to gamers.

We took at a look at BFGTech’s offerings a few weeks ago, which give you an overclocked core frequency right out of the box. This higher core frequency gave these cards a performance advantage compared to other stock GeForce 6600 GTs. Today we will be looking at a card that took a different approach to overclocking by,increasing the memory clock frequency over a stock 6600 GT instead of the core clock frequency. Later we’ll see if overclocking the memory allows for a higher level gaming experience than overclocking the core in six graphically challenging games.