Overclocking Comparison
With overclocking, every GPU is different, so a side effect of looking at this is that we get a good idea of how the 6600GT will overclock in a general sense. We can't really say that all Albatron cards will overclock by 90MHz. Believe us when we say that if they all would run at that speed, they would all be running at that speed and out-selling the competition. There are a lot of factors that go into it. That's why we base most of our recommendation and ranking decisions on cooling and noise levels rather than overclocking. It is still a factor though.
Those with a calculator handy will notice that the mean median and standard deviation are:
Mean: 568.10
Median: 571
Std. Dev.: 17.1840
Knowing NVIDIA, QA is going to assure that chips leaving labs will run at a little higher than stock clock speeds. This translates to a little bit of breathing room. What we pull away from this testing is that we expect Geforce 6600GT's to achieve a minium 7% overclock. A 9% to 12% overclock should be possible to most people who decide to own this card. Beyond that is icing on the cake. Of course, we are working with a very small sample size and we don't know much about the population as a whole either. We would have been more comfortable making predictions had this data looked more like a bell curve, but what we see is a little too flat for us to say anything with any statistical confidence.
Our memory clock speed graph shows Sparkle on top, but that's 2ns RAM on a 110MHz overclock. The XFX RAM is running 1.6ns RAM at a 10MHz overclock. This could be really lucky for Sparkle, but it isn't likely to happen on most boards. A 22% memory overclock, even with the added features of GDDR3, is still tough to pull off, especially when the 1.6ns memory only matched its performance. Inno3D also uses 1.6ns memory, but our final overclock ended up lower than the 600MHz that should have been possible with this part.
All the other solutions are 2ns memories which overclock between 50 and 100MHz. All the memories we looked at on 6600 GT boards are Samsung GDDR3 solutions.
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ChineseDemocracyGNR - Saturday, December 11, 2004 - link
#41, please remember this is a 20 page article, and things were written in a way people can easily read all 20 pages.overclockingoodness - Saturday, December 11, 2004 - link
#41: What do you mean barely readable? You are not some scholor who needs perfect writing in order to understand something. If you don't like it, don't read it.The reason why the review style was like a "quickly-patched email" is because it is a round-up of 11 cards.
The point of a round-up is to cover the positives and negatives of a plethora of similar products at the same time. Since AnandTech has already done extensive 6600 benchmarks, they decided to do quick comparison and be done with it.
Now you which 6600 to go for.
If you don't know how things work, it's better to be quiet.
skunkbuster - Saturday, December 11, 2004 - link
#41 lets see if you can do better thenmrscintilla - Saturday, December 11, 2004 - link
Sorry to say this, but the article Derek wrote was barely readable. It reads more like a quickly-patched email than an edited article. The writing quality has to improve in the future.SleepNoMore - Saturday, December 11, 2004 - link
Thank God XFX offers an AGP version of this card. I am not FORCED to buy a PCI-Express slot motherboard and trash my current system.QuestMGD - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
MSI heatsink really sucks. I had supicions about the heatsink after I got my MSI card from NewEgg. This article verified it. Since the card isn't in a computer yet, I pulled of the heatsink and sanded it down.I'm not done yet, but after a while it does look like I can get it to fit tightly, it was just a PIA. The mounting springs seem to have been originally designed correctly, the heatsink casting was just crap.
BTW heatsink is just copper colored coating over Aluminum or whatever, that's probably why the casting ended up so poor.
Could anyone e-mail me whether I can use CPU thermal compound on my Graphics Card memory chips, or should I go out and get something else? I've heard mixed opinions regarding this. Thanks.
threeply - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
I noticed No Evga card was included in the review. Any reason why this card was not included?Momental - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
Cobbling with your bogus dink is not recommended. See your doctor if condition persists. ;)A really great article. Extremely informative and gives "down and dirty", which I like. I'm in the market for a PCI-e 6600GT (sounds like a new motorcycle from Suzuki) and this article really gives one some serious food for thought rather then just the standard angle of "which one is the fastest and/or cheapest?"
The last thing I want is to have to handle one of these things like it was some sort of rare antiquity from the Ming Dynasty. While I don't do my best imitation of a ferrit on crack inside a case, it's good to know that there is the possibility of damaging the HSF quite easily. Who'd a thought!
ShadowVlican - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
thanks for the excellent write up Derek, i hope the vendors follow your advice to improve the contact issues with the HSF and GPU, since i won't be purchasing a gfx card with poor design that can be fixed so easilythe leadtek will be on top of my list and likely in my next comp as soon as a64 pci-e motherboards come out
JClimbs - Friday, December 10, 2004 - link
Excellent article, focusing on a few key issues that performance buffs tend to overlook in their quest for higher framerates.My overall take after reading this was that the 6600GT's market is really limited to people/companies willing to pull things apart and fix them up right. The cooling solutions all seem either bogus or cobbled, with cobbled being the best of the bunch. If you don't want to dink with your purchase, get a cobbled one; if you WILL dink with it, you can get a bogus model and fix it.
One thing I would like to have seen compared is power usage. I'm curious to see what the spread is there. And also, harking back to an earlier article, if improving the power supply improves overclocking performance.
Once again, excellent article, Derek!