Retail Geforce 6600GT Exploration

Gigabyte

The Gigabyte 6600 GT uses the standard rectangular HSF. This card has good fan noise characteristics and overclocked well in our tests.

Unfortunately, we had a little lab accident, which dislodged the HSF unit from the GPU. Wiggling the heatsink on other cards didn't matter as much because they used a thermal grease, but Gigabyte went with a thermal glue. The glue cracked, and we could never quite get the same connection that the chip had originally to the HSF.

This made it so that our idle and load temp numbers were a little higher than what we would expect otherwise.

We would love to get our hands on a fresh sample from Gigabyte for testing, but at the same time, this could easily have happened to any end user without anyone knowing any better. The importance of designing a thermal solution that will stay attached to the GPU can't be understated. This type of problem shouldn't be an issue.