|
 The
card is not available at Newegg nor Pricewatch making availability and price
unknowns. The score I gave the SPII card for price is indicative of other 6600GT
cards. Should this card end up costing more, I would have to revise the score.
In any event, hopefully, GIGABYTE and the retailers will price this card competitively
with other solutions, as performance just isn’t there.
I've reviewed many a video card over the last 5 years and I've generally tried
to balance my enthusiasm for a product with both the positives and negatives,
to give an overall view of the positioning and performance of a given product.
Last year, the 6600GT was a great mainstream product selling many units and
offering excellent performance for the price and in fact I've recommended 6600GTs
for people to play games. Unfortunately for GIGABYTE this 6600GT is being released
right before the replacement for this price range comes online. This month will
be an exciting one for NVIDIA based cards and ATI X1K cards are also entering
the market, making the choice of the 6600GT rather curious.
NVIDIA has been pushing their Power of 3 program. The Power of 3 stands for
Shader Model 3.0, SLI and HDR. The 6600GT offers support for all of these features.
From this point, all video cards in the mainstream market and higher are likely
to support some form of these three features. ATI has announced and released
the X1600 series meant to compete with the 6600GT, support HDR and Crossfire
motherboards have begun to enter the market. One noticeable exception is S3's
new Chrome 20 series cards that are likely to have similar performance to the
6600GT.
Positives of the card include silent operation, a decent overclock and efficient
heat dispersal with the heat pipes. Unfortunately, the cost of the silent operation
and the heat pipes is a 2-slot card. Generally when I recommend a 2-slot cooling
solution for a video card, I would expect higher performance than other cards
in the same chip class and price point. GIGABYTE strangely decided to use the
mid-end 6600GT to have the exotic cooling solution with default core clock speeds
and lowered memory clock speeds compared to NVIDIA's reference design. For these
reasons, I have a hard time recommending this card for anyone not looking for
a silent PC.
- Performancce 5
- Features 9
- Compatibility 10
- Price 7
- Availability 0
- Setup 10
- Overall Value 7
- Ease Of Use 10
- Support 10
- Softwaware 3
Total: 71 |
