There's been a lot of focus lately on how mainstream ATi and nVIDIA cards only have half the rendering pipelines of their high end counterparts. Let's remember something; both the NV43 and R410 have eight pixel rendering pipelines. This is the same number as on the Radeon 9800XT, and twice that of the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra. Both those cards are still pretty fast. That should already tell you that performance will be good. Right?!

As mentioned earlier, the GeForce 6600GT (NV43) core is built on IBM's 0.11 micron manufacturing process and contains a whopping 146 million transistors. nVIDIA has cut the vertex pipelines from the six found in the GeForce 6800 class cards to three in the GeForce 6600GT. To economize further, the memory controller has also been cut to 128bit. This means that at high resolutions with AA/AF enabled, the NV43 will not be able to handle the load as well as its more expensive sibling.

There are two models of the NV43 core, the GeForce 6600GT and plain GeForce 6600. The 'GT' that we're testing now has a core clock speed of 500 MHz, and memory running at 1 GHz. The vanilla Geforce 6600 version runs at 300 MHz core / 500 MHz memory. Both cards support all the latest DirectX 9.0C fun, as well as nVIDIA's Shader Model 3.0.

While the GeForce 6600GT core is technically SLI compatible, the card is not since it uses an AGP interconnect. This shouldn't be much of a surprise though. No SLI connector is present on the card for obvious reasons.

Overclocking the MSI NX6600GT-VTD128!

As the benchmarking began on the MSI NX6600GT-VTD128, we noticed that performance was extremely high even though the card is supposed to be clocked at a standard 500 MHz core, 900 MHz memory. After playing around a bit, I realized that the videocard was actually running at 578/1073, the maximum overclocked speed that the previous nVidia based card we reviewed, the Albatron Trinity GeForce 6600GT AGP, was able to achieve! It looks like the Detonator drivers didn't reset the speed even though a new card was being used.

Of course we were very pleased to see the MSI NX6600GT-VTD128 running well at 578MHz core, 1073MHz memory (and our job was made much easier). We didn't stop here though; instead we tried raising the clock speed of the core just a bit more.

This little adventure didn't go very far however... Anything higher than 581 MHz and the core would start to produce green artifacts when running 3DMark2001. I think its problems may have been due to heat, but unfortunately we didn't have any third-party GPU coolers handy so we gave up at that speed.

The MSI NX6600GT-VTD128 uses the same Samsung memory as the Albatron card so we didn't expect it to overclock much higher either. To our surprise, the 2.0ns Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 memory was able to hit a very nice 1085 MHz. We did try to get it past 1.1 GHz, but when we did so we encountered snow on some of the benchmarks.

PCStats Test System Specs:

system 1 system 2 processor: intel pentium 4 540 intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8anxp-d, i925x gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: gigabyte gv-rx60x128v gigabyte gv-nx57128d msi pcx5750-td128 albatron trinity pc5900 asus extreme eax600xt gigabyte gv-rx70p256v gigabyte gv-nx66t128d ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt albatron geforce 6800gt asus v9999 gamer edition albatron trinity geforce 6600gt msi fx5950 ultra-td128 msi fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 aopen geforcefx 5900xt msi nx6600gt-vtd128 memory: 2x 256mb crucial ballistix ddr2 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed 40gb wd special ed cdrom: gigabyte dvd burner msi x48 cd-rw/dvd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 6.0.1012 catalyst 4.11 detonator 66.93 windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 6.0.1012 catalyst 4.11 detonator 66.93 benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 codecreatures aquamark gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 doom3 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se x2 the threat ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems are different, but the results are included for reference.