Movies and video games usually mix about as well as oil and water. We've seen some horrible movies based on video games and vice versa.... and the DOOM3 movie is still to come... Shudder. Given this trend, when I heard about The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, I wasn't exactly about to reserve an advanced copy.

The game Chronicles of Riddick, is set before the movies Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick. Here the 'anti hero' Riddick attempts to make an escape from Butcher Bay which is supposed to be the deadliest prison in the Galaxy. Riddick was released simultaneously on consoles and PC, and the menu system, though flashy, reflects this. The game is pretty heavy with graphics and we found that 800x600 was the NX6600GT-VTD128SP's sweet spot. Anything higher and the card couldn't quite keep up. The textures and lighting are flat out beautiful though, and extremely reminiscent of those seen in Doom3 at maximum detail.

The game play itself is pretty impressive, mixing the currently fashionable stealth game play with some nice adrenaline pumping shootouts. Your in game character is Riddick himself, voiced by Vin Diesel, so if you can't stand him, avoid this game. Otherwise The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is a great first person shooter and a definite cut above the typical bundled games we see these days (and by far the best movie tie-in I have ever played).

As a final note, Riddick is an 'M' rated game, and it deserves it, as swearing, and extremely graphic violence are sprinkled liberally throughout. It's almost like prime-time CNN!

Overclocking the red beast

Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 500MHz 601MHz Memory Speed: 1000MHz 1075MHz

GeForce 6600GT videocards are already quite speedy at stock, but the MSI NX6600GT-VTD128SP should be slightly faster than the average card. Clearly marked on the box, MSI indicates that this card is using 1.6ns DDR3 memory and that its default memory clock speed is 1 GHz.

As mentioned, the NX6600GT-VTD128SP's memory is clocked at 1 GHz by default and since it's using 1.6ns DRAM, we were hoping for quite a bit more. Going up about 10 MHz at a time, the memory seemed pretty good at overclocking as well. Ultimately, we were able to go as high as 1075 MHz.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: gigabyte ga-k8nxp-sli (nf4-sli) gigabyte ga-k8nsnxp-939 (nf3 ultra) videocard: msi rx800xt-vtd256e gigabyte gv-rx80l256v powercolor x700 pro msi nx6800gt-t2d256e albatron trinity geforce 6600gt agp msi nx6600gt-td128 albatron trinity pc6600 albatron trinity pc6600u asus extreme n6600top/td/128/a gigabyte gv-3d1 (single mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (sli mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (single mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (sli mode) msi nx6600gt-vtd128sp memory: 2x 512mb mushkin pc3200 l2 v2 hard drive: 74gb wd raptor 10k rpm sata hdd cdrom: aopen 52x combo powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w software setup windowsxp build 2600 nforce catalyst 4.12 detonator 66.93 benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 codecreatures aquamark aquamark3 gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 doom3 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems use a different motherboard but results are shown for reference.