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Reviews Arrive For nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP
bhtooefr writes "The Tech Report got their hands on a reference board of the nV 6600GT AGP, and did some benchmarks. Interestingly, even with a slower memory clock on the AGP card, it was FASTER in some benchmarks than the PCI-E card. Tests performed were: Doom 3, CS:Source, Far Cry, 3DMark05, Rome: Total War, and Xpand Rally (the last two tested with FRAPS)."
pacmanfan contributes links to more reviews at
Extreme Tech, Hard OCP and PC Perspective.
The main reason I see to move to PCI Express is that it is a fully open standard by the PCI Consortium, rather than AGP which is an Intel trade secret. It is because of this that AMD had horrible AGP support for a long time, but with the open standard that is PCI-Express everyone wins.
Plus you can daisy-chain multiple PCI-E cards for SLI, which is neat.
Damien
Just when I break down and buy a Geforce FX5900XT, they come out with an AGP version of the 6600.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Mobo manufacturers still need to up the PCI-E bus bandwidth before we can daisy chain though. Right now there just isn't enough space for two cards, let alone two cards and other addons.
By the time thr prices drop there will be more information like this article on the differences / advantages of PCI-E over AGP. Think I'll wait until then before deciding on an upgrade.
the impressive video card in my Xbox, a PC in itself, is still 1/10th the price of this thing. Anyone else wonder why PC gaming is dying off?
AFAIR the first agp/4x/8x cards and boards were a bit slower then the former generation interface, so maybe we should let the technology mature for a bit...
On the other hand Extremetech's review find the PCIe version much faster, so it might be a configuration issue...
AGP 50h 102m>
Your l33tn3ss >>>ANNIHILATES>> PCI-E!
Your l33tn3ss ===OBLITERATES=== PCI-E!
PCI-E is DEAD!
AGP 50h 97m> sac corpse
CmdrTaco gives you one gold coin for your sacrifice.
AGP 50h 97m>
The following is a compilation of information I have gathered concerning the mysterious planet X, which supposedly is going to make a close pass to Earth at some time in the near future, which according to some, may have devastating consequences for the inhabitants of said planet. It may be a hoax, or it may be for real. You decide...
Planet X, or the 10th planet, may be on an elliptical orbit that will have it pass between our own Sun and Earth. According to Russian scientist Zacharia Sitchin, it could soon fly past Earth, and may cause what some scholars and scientists feel could become a human catastrophe -- on a Biblical scale! Recently, a group of scientists in Russia held several meetings to discuss an inbound planet discovered from one of their largest observatories. The top government officials called for a commission to study the problem, which was said to expect to cause a string of calamities and a massive population shrinkage." They openly wondered whether Russia would still even exist as a country afterwards...
While many American scientists scoff at Sitchin's work, prominent Russian scientists (in consultation with thier government) along with several independent researchers around the globe, are deeply concerned that Planet X could make a close pass to Earth as his work suggests. Such a flyby could result in a terrestrial catastrophe that could very well place mankind in the cross hairs of a major kill off. Can we afford to scoff at this threat any longer? Are there any potential effects of its passing?
It is felt that planet X will pass close by our planet. At the moment of it's passing it is possible that the Earth may be overtaken by its gravitational influence, being a much larger planetary body. Sometimes referred to as the red comet or red star in some ancient texts, or the star "Wormwood" in the Bible, the effects of its passage may range far and wide according to some experts opinions. The Earth may stop rotating completely for 3 days. Electrical/magnetic storms may occur of an intensity that could cause lasting damage to our global infrastructure. As the Earth passes through tail of Planet X's passage, dust and debris may rain down upon our planet compromising our ability to supply food, and most importantly, water.
Planet X is reported to be four times larger, and twenty three times more dense than the Earth. The Bible states (defining it as Wormwood in The Book of Revelation) that when it passes, its magnetic and gravitational effects upon the Earth's molten iron core will cause increased earthquakes/ volcanic eruptions, and other phenomena. Speaking of the last days, it states: "Then the second angel sounded: And something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. And a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. Then the third angel sounded: And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the water, because it was made bitter."
I have noticed over the last ten years, as I am sure the readers of this site also have noticed, the drastic change in our present day weather patterns, increased earthquake/ volcanic activity, reports of the gradual slowing of the Earth's rotation and geomagnetic planetary field deviations, and other anomalies. All of which are allegedly due to the energy being released by our planet in response to the gravitational field that is preceding Planet X.
Nasa will continue to identify objects ahead and around X to misdirect attention. The normal helpful & professional Nasa employees are being evasive & condescending when asked about it. How Nasa has chosen to handle their knowledge of Planet X fits into a pattern of concealment X has INTENTIONALLY BEEN MADE TO SOUND RIDICULOUS and confusing for several reasons. One of which is to avoid causing panic amon
how good the 6600 AGP is, even pretty close to the 6800.
I wonder how long away nVidia's next GPU is?
I don't understand. Why would it be important for a company like Intel to spread information about the benefits of their pet technology over a more accessible alternative?
They got "Rome: Total War" to run? Wow!
The rate at which new cards come out is ridiculous.
I'm happy with my nVidia GeForce 420 MX. I mean,
who's going to notice the difference between 250 frames/sec and 300? 25fps is good enough for TV.
I fail to see the reason people get excited over such things.
Is there any area of IT that actually requires the best available graphics card?
Lets not forget AnandTech's review either http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2277
I think this card is a great one, but it looks like most store are marking it up too much. I think it should retail for around $200, but the cheapest I have found it is $220 with most store on the web hovering around $250. This card needs to be at $200 since vanilla 6800s can be found for $250. I'm looking for a new card myself, and this is definetly on the top of my list. The only thing holding me back is the possibility that I might be able to get a 9800 Pro for $150 from a friend.
SIGFAULT
A video card that will easily play Doom3 and HL2 and cost around $200. Of course this card has been out for awhile...but few people have a PCI-e board (Now it's a viable AGP upgrade).
Also worth noting is that the 6600 offers full support for Shader Model 3.0 and DirectX 9.0C, ATI does not currently offer support for this yet.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Steve Jobs invented nvidia.
Even if the AGP version of the 6600GT outperforms the PCI express version slightly, there is still the value of the PCI ex version to function on the new SLI boards, whenever they come out.
The 6600 cards are pretty reasonably priced, so picking up two of them and getting 180% performance of a single 6600GT AGP is pretty attractive and a sufficient reason to drool over the new NForce4 boards(for the AMD enthusiasts among us).
The Current intel boards with SLI are considerably more expensive than the new NForce4 boards figure to be, so while there is still a few weeks till I can get my hands on one, I can't wait to get a pair of 6600GTs running in SLI mode with a respectable AMD 64 chip.
Here's another GeForce 6600GT Review from Hardware Analysis.
I purchased a AGP 6800 for my gaming box, and haven't been disappointed yet. I haven't tried it under RedHat yet, I'm still trying to decide if I want to upgrade to FC3 or not. As long as it plays UT 2004 with everything cranked under XP and RedHat, I'll be a happy camper. I'd love to pick up a PCI Express based motherboard, but still nothing out for my 64 yet.
rm -rf
It seems Nvidia has been pushing their PCI-E cards, which haven't really found any foothold in the market. Who wants to buy a new motherboard for a few extra frames per second?
If you want performance without paying $400+ for something like the 6800/x800, the 6600 is for you. This is the card us cheap-thrill monkeys have been drooling over. The only bad thing I can say about this card, is that it hasn't come out sooner - Half Life 2 is running mighty poorly on my Ti4200.
Nvidia really would've cleaned up had they released this prior to HL2 release.
Interesting to note that Toms hasn't posted on this yet. I wonder how long they will take to get it to the review done to their satisfaction? Good for them.
where do I get that job. I'd like to do some professional 'testing' myself...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Who really cares about PCI-X anyway? If it's faster speed and Open Standards you want, it's HyperTransport all the way.
:P But this is what is upcoming in the tech world.
Plus, one has the ability to offload multiple busses. I've seen multiple PCI-X busses running on an SMP Opteron system via HT, and it rocks! There's nothing out there in the PC arena which can touch it.
Of course, I may have violated my NDA.
SMP Opterons with multiple HT busses rule this world; and Intel is so far behind the curve it's not funny.
Now if I could only have an HT graphics card. PCI-X and AGP are yesterday's technology, IMHO.
am I the only geek who does NOT play video/computergames?
while I love seeing hardware reviews, there has GOT to be another way to test video cards other than playing games. fps and all the other game-centric metrics are completely useless to me.
what other metrics can be applied to video cards?
the history of the world
I have an athlon 2600+ which was a great purchase.
We all know that more cpu power isn't really needed right now. Because of this the idea of buying a new system to upgrade a graphics board seems silly, I have a 9000 pro which still runs everything quite well but could use an upgrade.
So my options are to spend $300 cnd on a 9800 pro or 6800? Not the greatest options.
I have the money but I'd rather not, plus if I'm going to buy such a high end card it really sucks I won't be able to put it into my next system.
Most people are probably looking at the 939 platform as their next upgrade.
As far as CPU's go, dual core is hitting in about a year. That's a significant upgrade, coupled with 64bit.
So I mainly need a card to ease my current system out but which will have linux compatibility once it becomes my server, for that Nvidia is the best and a high end card won't do.
Basically for anyone who wants to put another card in their computer this is the way to go. This is the perfect card and the fact that it was pciE only really really sucked.
On the other hand both ATI and Nvidia should be looking at a new product cycle in febuary-april so you might want to hold out. But I get the feeling it'll be a 5800-5900 9800 pro to xt type cycle not a 8500 to 9700 type cycle.
Partially due to no new technology like AA or DX9 coming out in the near future.
The 8 pixel pipelines kinda hurts whereas the 6800 can have all 16 unlocked but that doesn't make these cards any less powerful and there should be plenty of power here till a pciE upgrade is required.
D.
Unfortunately for the PCIe users (and I am one, the new box that $EMPLOYER got me uses PCIe video) graphics are quite sensitive to latency.
I'm one of the SPICE trolls at $EMPLOYER who developed the I/O stuff for both AGP and PCIe. For what it's worth, I won't be switching to PCIe until it looks like I don't have a choice.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Fast low latency chipset?
Probably biggest reason for AGP version to beat the PCI-E version
Drivers?
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
The parent is spot-on. Current AGP 8x bandwidth is 8x(266*8, 2128MB/sec), but the performance difference between 4x(266*4, 1064MB/sec) and 8x is negligable(around a percent, within experimental error). Considering that x1 PCIe is 250MB/sec, PCIe and AGP are effectively running at the same speed given the same multiplier. If you take in to consideration that we just said that we aren't making use of anything past AGP 4x yet, it's a logical assumption that PCIe x4 should also be enough, and that x8 would be enough for the next generation of cards that would somehow need the doubled bandwidth.
But getting back to the point, the current PCIe graphics standard is x16, which at 4GB/sec(and this is each way, BTW - PCIe is full duplex, AGP is half) is far more than we need. The current solution of dividing up the 16 lanes from that single slot in to 2 groups of 8 lanes for 2 PCIe x8 slots(though using an x16 connector for power issues) still results in each card recieving more bandwidth than it can effectively use. With a single x16 slot, PCIe is future-proof enough that bandwidth won't be an issue for some long period of time, and than the x8 SLI solution won't be bandwidth limited for some shorter, but still long enough period of time that it's not going to be a realistic issue until at least the 3rd or 4th generation PCIe motherboard chipsets are released, at which point they can be built with more lanes.
Since you're posting as AC, so am I.
Your entire post can be cut to one phrase: you're bitching about franchises. Apparently the fact that there was a DOOM and DOOM 2 automatically means any other title carrying that name is "non-innovative". Despite the obvious differences between the games. Newsflash for you: Franchises also exist in Console games (fuck, was Metroid Prime "more of the same"?).
Half-life has enough gaming awards to give any game developer a penis envy.
And more importantly, those were just examples for "current" game developers that are easy to relate with. Do you thing Ubisoft is not doing well? Bioware? Epic? Shit, has EA stopped making money too? PC gaming is in no shape or form "dying".
6 frames per second in The Sims 2, at least while you're moving the camera. Otherwise 160 FPS, when the camera is set. :)
What you're missing however, is that newer games are using substantially more RAM to introduce higher quality textures, and more textures overall, thereby improving the visual image.
They're also making more use of the newer shaders. The facial expressions in HL2 and env-mapped water and caustics from that and other games don't happen magically by themselves.
The bottom line is you'll get better visal quality in a newer game using a newer card. This doesn't mean an older card won't play it, but the visual component of the experience isn't going to be as good.
Most 3D Software (games especially, and other visualization-heavy portions of the industry, including film and CAD) is generally developed on and targeted at the best card available at the time of developement. The best card however will not be this one, as this is a midrange gamer card from the most recent generation.
The key difference between a Programmer and a Senior Programmer is that one of them is Mexican.
I can't even get AGP support working on my SiS730 ECS board to get my 5700LE working at full speed. It just crashes repatedly and won't make it into Windows without severe corruption.
Last thing I need is to shell out $200 for something that will be %2 faster than what I have.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Weren't fucking mentioned AT ALL.
It really does depend on whether you have the slider set to "high performance" or "high quality". Show me a respectable article, using both vendors ideas of optimizations, and then show me some bitmap screenshots to observe any artifacts for myself.
I rate the journalism at the "Jean-Baptiste Zorg" level. Which is just above the "Mr. Shadow" level that the Washington Post routinely shoots at...
The reason why nvidia's PCIe cards are slow, is
that, unlike ATI, nvidia doesnt do native PCIe.
They simply convert their AGP chips to a PCIe
interface.
They should drop the legacy shit, and design a
proper modern card.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Actually, if you read the article, you would see that the NV43 chipset that the 6600 uses is a native PCI Express chip, and they use a bridge chip to make an AGP version of the card. This is why PCI-E versions of the 6600 have been out for a while, but the AGP version just became available today.
From the first page of the article:
"The NV43, however, already has a built-in PCI Express interface, so for the AGP version of the GeForce 6600 GT, NVIDIA is turning the HSI chip around and using it to bridge between the PCI-E graphics chip and an AGP motherboard."
(Score: -1; Flat-out Wrong)
We really need this moderation option.
As I plan on acquiring HL2 and playing on my Ti4200. It just annoys me to no end that you can buy a really fast cpu, a nice big hard drive, or many other quality computer items for ~100 but when it comes to video cards your always looking at $175-$200 for anything that will last a few years.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
You got it backwards, dude. The card in this review speaks PCIe, that's why there's a second chip in there, it's the PCIe <-> AGP bridge. :)
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/17/1 354207
I have had an Nvidia card for several years, they are generally a good company (or at least better than ATI in my opinion). Even though their drivers are not open source I still enjoy the fact they support linux, and I will continue to purchase from them.
Consoles, AFAIK will only hook to NTSC composite video. This 50 year old tech limits greatly the quality of the video. Games utterly look like shit on every console I have seen. A standard TV can not even display 640x480 very well..
Now when HDTV becomes more common and there are consoles that will utilize it (or provide VGA outputs), then I will consider console gaming...
Oh yeah, I do a lot of map editing - I like my games customized, how would I do that on an XBOX again?
All I want for Christmas is an Nvidia AGP 6600 GT.
P.S. I've been very good this year!
While this bodes good news for those with AGP only systems, does anyone remember when the launch of the 6600 GT PCIe was? A few months ago. Yet, even today, is it available in quantites so that no one has to worry about not getting one? No.
Essentially, all 'launches', as many people call them, are more or less paper launches, with the actual release of the hardware a few months later. This may be good from the company's perspective, but for the regular consumer, what difference does it make that there was a paper launch and when the product is actually available?
Even with some stores in my local area, and also the big chains as well, I still can't get a 6800 or a X800 Pro, and even in the place that do, they are way too expensive for the ordinary person.
I have also noticed that time difference between product launches and paper launches are getting longer and longer.
i doubt this will have much of an effect on the gradual phasing out of agp... pcie has numerous benefits and the performance will be unleashed once software developers catch up
Get your torrents...