GIGABYTE chose to differentiate their new 6600GT with making it a two slot card. Most 6600GTs are single slot solutions with a fan cooling the card. GIGABYTE decided to replace the fan with a heatsink covering the graphics chip. Two pipes exit the heatsink to a large grille on the front of the PCB and one on the back of the PCB. During operation, the heat from the graphics chip is transferred to the grilles, keeping the card cool.

GIGABYTE outfitted the card with 8 32MB 2ns DDR3 memory chips. The 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus offering up to 8GB of memory bandwidth to the card (500x2x128/8=16GB). This is the same memory bandwidth as found on the GEFORCE 5800 Ultra high-end card of 3 years ago. Memory bandwidth on video cards has been progressing at an incredible pace. Today’s X1800XT from ATI has over 48GB of memory bandwidth.

The card comes with the standard array of input/output ports on the side of the PCB as in one DVI-I port, one D-Sub port and a TV-Out port. One thing I wish GIGABYTE had included was dual DVI ports. Unfortunately, only one is provided along with a standard D-Sub 15-pin VGA port. NVIDIA cards use nView to manage dual monitors. You can use two CRTs, one LCD+one CRT or one LCD+TV depending on your needs.

Bundle

GIGABYTE 6600GV-NX66T256DE card
PowerDVD 6
TV-Out adapter
DVI-I to D-Sub adapter

The bundle that GIGABYTE included with the 6600GV-NX66T256DE was minimal at best. The card came with PowerDVD 6 from Cyberlink a software DVD program. I prefer WinDVD from InterVideo, but it is a solid DVD player. The TV Out adapter has S-Video-Out, Y, Pr, and Pb/AV ports. GIGABYTE also includes a DVI-I to D-Sub adapter allowing the user to have two CRT monitors or one LCD+CRT or one LCD monitor as choices.

GIGABYTE included their proprietary tweaking program called GIGABYTE Utility. Gigabyte’s Utility manager allows looking at the display properties, system properties, changing the resolution and color bit depth of the screen, add/remove programs, zoom in or out of the screen, VTuner2, Color correction, VGA information and more.

I used 81.85 Forceware drivers for testing. GIGABYTE included the 77.72 drivers, but NVIDIA has released several later driver versions. With Coolbits, I was able to overclock the video card to 523/480, an overclock of 23/80 core/memory. GIGABYTE decided to use a lowered memory clock speed of 400MHz instead of the 500MHz found on other 6600GT cards. The memory type is DDR-2, not the DDR-3 found on other 6600GTs. It’s kind of disappointing that with the exotic cooling solution GIGABYTE uses they couldn’t include a higher clock.