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Performance

With all these cards sticking to reference design (except for the MSI NX6600 VTD128R, since its a GeForce 6600), they offer roughly the same level of performance. The GT cards are using 500 MHz for the core and 500 MHz DDR for the memory, while MSI NX6600 VTD128R uses 400 MHz. All cards comes with 128 MB memory.

We didn't experience any crash or artifacts with any of the cards. Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 'Newcastle' socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 71.22 & 66.81 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce system driver version 5.1 (motherboard supplied driver)
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit integrated (motherboard supplied driver)
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

We see the GT's bunching up here, the performance within a hair of each other. Not surprising, since they're all using the same core and memory clock. As to be expected, the MSI NX6600 VTD128R is slower (about 10 to 20 %), particularly when we push the card to its limits with AA and AF. Even so, it still manage a respectable average 64.3 fps on 1600 x 1200, 32 bit with 4x AA and 16 AF.


This demo uses lots of shaders, so the test results serves as a good indicator of a graphics card's shader power. Of course, with shaders, higher clock does offer an advantage. So, it's not a surprise the MSI NX6600 is struggling a little bit here - remember it is running 100 MHz or 1/5th slower than the other cards. As a general note, the cards are more suited for playing at 1024 x 768, 32 bit with AF.

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