PNY Geforce 6 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 AGP 8X
PNY Geforce 6 6600GT 128MB GDDR3 AGP 8X
Price: £110 inc VAT @ time of writing
Site: PNY
Date: Feb 2006
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Installing:
No real problems to report, I removed my previous card and slotted this into its place, connected a power connector to the card and then booted. The fan on the card is very quiet my Northbridge fan on my motherboard and of course the processor heat sink fans make a lot more noise than this one did.
The system I used was running Windows XP, and as expected it installed the standard VGA drivers and prompted me to inset the driver CD. A few clicks and a reboot later and the card was installed. The only changes I made were to increase the refresh rate to my preferred setting.
Performance:
The card ran effortlessly, it was quiet and as expected worked perfectly in everyday applications. When playing games such as Half Life 2 etc the improvement in textures and speed of the graphics loading on screen was a big leap over my current low end card. You do need to take into account that the machine used for this review is not one of the latest 64-bit dual core processor based models with vast amounts of memory. Instead it is of a performance I would call entry level by today's standards 1.5GHz with 512MB of ram.
So when comparing any of the results below you should expect a jump in performance if used with a higher end setup.
Performance of graphic cards can be very hard to convey to the reader. This card made a vast improvement in speed of textures and maps loading in everygame I tried. As expected it performed flawlessly and is highly reccomended.
Not only can you play the latest graphic hungry titles around but you can of course take advantage of the other connectors to allow DVI interface and dual screens to be used so you can spread your desktop and workspace over a much larger distance.
Price wise it is very reasonable, remeber this is from the latest Geforce range with a fast processor dedicated to graphics and plenty of fast DDR3 ram to allow it to run quickly.
