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The Geforce 6600 is the first card from Nvidia that has native PCI Express support. Motherboards for PCI Express have been slow in rolling out but the general feeling is that it is being accepted as the natural progression from from AGP 8x. Codenamed the NV43 the Geforce 6600 has the same feature line up as its bigger brother the Geforce 6800 (NV40). The way that Nvidia have managed to cut the costs of this mainstream card have been to lower the core clock speed and the memory speed and also cut the amount of pixel pipelines from 16/12 (ultra/standard) to 8 and the vertex shaders from 6/5 to 3. Features of the Geforce 6600 (NV43)
The Geforce 6600 can change configurations so don't be surprised if you see some versions with a different set of memory and clock speeds as well as size of the onboard memory. The final difference between the 6800 and the 6600 series of cards is the memory bus width. The power card of the Geforce 6800 has a 256-bit wide memory bus. Again to save costs the 6600 has had the memory bus width reduced to 128-bits. All this taken into account the Geforce 6600 will be a worthy mainstream card.
As with most of cards released by Nvidia and ATI, they come in more than one flavour. In the case of the Geforce 6600 we have the Geforce 6600 GT (look above for basic specs). The GT version has the same features as the 6600 in that has all the technology that the NV40 (Geforce 6800 series) has and it has been cut back in the same way. The pixel pipelines have been reduced to 8 and the vertex shaders reduced to 3. However the GT version of the card has had its core and memory speeds ramped up. Also you will find that the standard Geforce 6600 uses GDDR memory, the GT version will be equipped with the newer GDDR3 standard. Nvidia have resisted in calling this the "ultra version" because they want to reserve this branding for what they call the "enthusiast" products. Basically the mainstream cards will not come with an ultra version. Only the top of the range cards they produce will be privy to the name "ultra". The first batch of the Geforce 6600 and the Geforce 6600 GT cards will be in the PCI express form. Many users at the time of writing will not have a slot for a PCI Express in there current motherboard. However the technology is growing fast and will soon be in the majority of motherboards released. The Geforce 6600 and the GT version will require a motherboard with a PCI Express 16x slot available (This is a standard graphics slot on a motherboard with PCI Express) The Geforce 6600 and the GT version will have AGP 8x version coming out soon with the help of a HSI bridge chip, This is Nvidia solution to cutting down manufacturing costs. This bridge chip will be able to utilise the current GPU's for the PCI express cards and allow them to work in an AGP 8x environment. By adding this simple chip Nvidia will not have to produce a completely different card. This should keep them very competitive in the price wars for this level of card. For more information on PCI Express read our article here You may remember the older days of SLI, when the terminology referred to "Scan Line Interleave" Those were the days of 3Dfx and the famous Voodoo 2 graphics cards. The Idea behind SLI was that you could plug 2 of the same cards into the same PC and have them work together. The idea now is back with the 6 series of cards from Nvidia. The same principles apply as before you can connect 2 of the same cards together inside one machine. The difference now is that the technology behind it has been refined and is much better equipped to handle today's gaming conditions. The idea with the scalable link interface is that unlike the original SLI where the cards split the work evenly line by line, the cards split the image in half making the processing easier. Sometimes however one half maybe more complex and take longer to render than the other. Because of the scalable nature of the Nvidia SLI, a calculation is made before each frame and then the image is split accordingly. I.e. 70/30 where the 30 percent will be the portion of the image which is more complex and while take longer to render. * Please note that SLI is optional to manufacturers so check to see if your card is capable of running SLI. For more information of the new SLI see our article here The Geforce 6600 and the 6600 GT will feature Standard VGA output for analogue monitors, DVI for Digital monitors (mainly LCD screens) and an S-Video port for TV-OUT. With the Twin RAMDACs you can use your Geforce 6600 on two screens with the help of NView technology. Either set up as a clone mode where both screens have the same picture on. Or you can set them up as an extended desktop view and have extra screen space for you desktop. CineFX 3.0 Shading Architecture
64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending1
Intellisample 3.0 Technology2
UltraShadow II Technology
Advanced Video and Display Functionality
Advanced Display Functionality
Advanced Engineering
NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0
Operating Systems
API Support
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