Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT (GV-NX66T128D)

I jumped right into aggressive territory when I started overclocking the GV-NX66T128D, and it did not agree with what I was trying to do to it. Using Gigabyte's V-Tuner II application, I set the core clock to 650 MHz, which is a huge 150 MHz jump. The system began to act weird and then rebooted itself. So, I worked the core clock down and memory clock up a little bit. I thought I had a winning combination at 590/1120, but, when I ran 3DMark05, green flashes were showing up all over the screen. The GPU or memory obviously did not like those settings. Eventually, I found that 560/1100 was about all I was going to get out of this board. These are fairly good overclocking results, but I was just hoping to get more out of this card.

I re-ran 3DMark05 and Doom 3 to see how much of an increase in performance this overclocking yielded.

Seeing the performance of the Gigabyte 6600 GT makes it quite obvious that the 6600 GT is a great example of getting a lot for relatively little. Equipped with eight pixel pipelines, a 128-bit memory interface, and 128 megabytes of GDDR3 memory, the 6600 GT makes a strong showing as the new king of NVIDIA's midrange product offerings.

Gigabyte's hardware solution does not break away from the norm at all, like their 6800 board does with its completely passive cooling solution, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows Gigabyte to price this board vey competitively, even though two recently released (and good) games are included in the package. You can actually pick up this board for less than $200 from reputable e-tailers! If you're reading this and thinking that you are missing out on this awesome GPU because you don't have a PCI Express equipped PC, don't worry, NVIDIA also offers an AGP version of this card. It's clocked a little slower and will cost a little more, but it should still be a great bang-for-your-buck video card.

I highly recommend this board (or any other 6600 GT) to anyone looking to get a great PC upgrade for a couple C notes.

Pros:

+ Great price/performance ratio
+ Decent overclocking headroom
+ Bundle includes two recent games but doesn't seem to inflate the price
+ HDTV output via included adapter

Cons:

- Still trying to think of one...