The PC Perspective Podcast is your weekly stop for the latest PC tech news and reviews! Give it a listen!

Summary

This is a basic preview of this product intended for readers who just want the quick look at the new product.  If you are interested in the full review, with all the technical data and benchmarks that you are used to seeing on PC Perspective, please click on this link to get to that article.

The 6600 GPU is nothing new; it was initially released on April 24, 2004.  Since then the 6600 has been one of the best budget-based graphics cards on the market, if not THE best.  However, when ATI releasd the X1300 GPU this past October, NVIDIA finally saw some real competition to the 6600 card at the under $100 price range.  It is a testament to the GeForce 6-series GPU that the core is still very competitive today against the latest from ATI, but to help the 6600 last a bit longer, NVIDIA released a refresh recently to the card that added support for DDR2 memory and a 256 MB frame buffer.  The previous 6600s mostly used DDR memory with 128 MB buffers, so the addition of twice the memory and an increase in memory speed should help the NVIDIA 6600 GPU stay alive through the holiday.

You can see that the heatsink is pretty small and the fan is slow enough to remain quiet.  As you'll find in our overclocking results, this doesn't mean the GPU is near overheating by any means.

There are no heatsinks on the memory since the chips are running at only 400 MHz (800 MHz DDR) and don't need the additional cooling like we saw on the recently released 1.7 GHz speeds on the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512 MB. 

Specifications

• NVIDIA 6600 GPU
• 400 MHz Core clock
• 800 MHz Memory clock
• 256 MB DDR2 memory

Let's see some quick performance numbers here:

There is little doubt now that NVIDIA again has the upper hand in the sub-$100 GPU market with their re-made 6600 product.  By doubling the memory and speeding it up to DDR2 speeds from DDR1, the new 6600 256 MB DDR2 card is able to outpace the X1300 Pro GPU from ATI in nearly all of our tests.  Only in a couple of tests did the ATI card tie or win (and when it did it was VERY close) and in many cases the NVIDIA card simply dominated the competition. 

Final Thoughts

The new NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with DDR2 memory support again takes the performance lead in the budget GPU market.  Casual gamers and second-system builders will definitely want to give this GPU, and in particular this model from our friends at XFX, a good look.

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the XFX 6600 256 MB, and anything else you may want to buy!

Click here for the Detailed Review