Tech-Hounds.com

Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset GeForce 6600 128 MB, 128 bit

Not everyone can afford graphics card such as the GeForce 6800 or 7800 series. One, not everyone can or are willing to pay that much for a graphics card. Two, not many people really need that kind of performance. And of course, three, not many people will tolerate the heat, noise and power drain these cards can reach under heavy load. For most people, mainstream cards such as the GeForce 6600GT and Radeon X700 Pro offer the best combination between price, performance and convenience.

Gigabyte's GeForce 6600GT is one such a card. Unlike the Radeon X700 Pro Silent Pipe we tested last month, the GeForce 6600GT comes with more 'practical' cooling approach. If you're searching for a graphics card for an small form factor (SFF) PC mainly used for multimedia and Internet use with gaming performance to boot, this card is worth a look.

Overview

Gigabyte 6600GT
500/560 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 128 MB DDR3
Core Clock : 500 MHz
Memory Clock : 560 MHz (1120 MHz DDR3)

Overall Score: 85 points



We mentioned this card have a more 'practical' approach to cooling. We know that the GeForce 6600GT produces far more heat than the Radeon X700 Pro, so Gigabyte thoughtfully bundle a blower fan - you place this fan with it's mounting bracket on the slot next to the graphics card. Since the heatsink is placed on both sides of the card, you can place the fan on either side - we recommend placing it on the back side if you're using a mini tower case. If you're using two of these cards in a SLI setup, you can use just one to cool both cards by placing it between the cards. You can still use the second fan if you want to, but that's not necessary.

You'll notice that this card is different from GeForce 6600GT in general. Not only does it uses passive cooling, it also uses a slightly higher memory clock. Of course, higher memory clock means higher bandwidth and that is always a good thing. Other than that, the card is your typical GeForce 6600GT. The bundle .includes the obvious accessories such as DVI to analog dongle plus the HDTV dongle (with video input). There's no extension cable so make sure you have a long enough cable to hook it up to your HDTV set.



Gigabyte bundles two games with this card: Thief: Deadly Shadows from Ion Storm (in a DVD) and Joint Operations from Novalogic. For DVD playback, there's Cyberlink PowerDVD in the drivers and utilities CD. You'll also find Gigabyte's own VTuner utility. Just like the Gigabyte's GeForce 6600GT, there's no hardware monitoring available on the utility. You'll have to rely on basic hardware monitoring built into NVIDIA's Forceware drivers.

One oversight we notice on this card is that the heatsink is only used to cool the chip and the the memory chips. Very unfortunate, since the passive heatsink blocks you from cooling them yourself. You'll have to rely on air cooling. We really wish Gigabyte hadn't done this, particularly since the card is running the memory a little faster than the reference specification.

Heat

Of course, with this kind of cooling, we obviously are interested in heat. Just like before, we loop the demo1 timedemo in Doom 3 for half an hour and basically eyeball the temperature reading on the Forceware panel. This may not be the most accurate method of measurement, but it will give you some idea of what temperatures you expect from this card.

	Core Idle	Core Full Load	Ambient
without fan	66º Celsius	105º Celsius	36º Celsius
with fan	62º Celsius	85º Celsius	36º Celsius

From this quick and dirty test, you can see that Gigabyte made the right move to bundle a fan - without any air blowing on either side of the heatsink, the card reach 66º Celsius just on the desktop and up to 105 º Celsius on heavy load. We still some increase after 105 º Celsius, but we stopped testing after ten minutes (after all we don't want to damage the card). With a fan (even a very slow and quiet one), we get much tolerable temperatures.

Performance

Since this card has slight clock advantage, naturally there will be performance differences with reference GeForce 6600GT cards. Of course, the reason is how much. With just a memory clock difference, you shouldn't expect night and day difference. However, unlike most 'exotically cooled' solutions, Gigabyte is pricing the GeForce 6600GT slightly below reference GeForce 6600GT cards. That's interesting, since you get the performance and silence at a slightly lower price. But enough talk, let's see what kind of performance this card offer.

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+ 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 77.72 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

The memory clock difference helped the GeForce 6600Gt Silent Pipe reach a higher average fps, maintaining a lead of 2 to 4 fps in general. Its not much and you won't really notice the difference. This is expected since we're only looking at a 60 MHz difference.


In Splinter Cell, we see the difference is larger, between 3 to 5 fps from around 40 to 60 fps. That's noticeable, especially since even on heavy loads, the Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT has a slightly higher minimum fps than the other GeForce 6600GTs.


We skipped testing F1 Career Challenge for now, since Forceware 77.72 we used has a bug which causes very slow frame rates with shadows enabled. We're looking at newer drivers to see if NVIDIA fixed that bug, but you can probably guess that the performance of the card very much matches the other GeForce 6600GT. Moving on to Nascar 2003, we see that the Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe is again around 2 fps faster, nearly reaching the 50 fps mark.


We've added some new games to our benchmark suite - Brothers in Arms, SW: Knights of the Old Republic and Homeworld 2. We didn't test all the GeForce 6600GT in the last round up with these games, that's why you're only seeing two graphics card scores. As you can see, Brothers In Arms really likes more bandwidth - the Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT is faster by a wide margin than the reference GeForce 6600GT (around 12 fps). With 4x AA and 16x AF, the difference is smaller (3 fps), probably since the core clock is the same.


Homeworld 2 is already running as fast as it can on the reference GeForce 6600GT cards, so we're not seeing any noticeable difference with Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe. We've update the game with the latest updates and thankfully, AA and AF are now working! Even so, some aliasing can still be seen but that's another topic (or article)..


We've updated the game for this testing, so this may account for the fps difference, though unlikely because we're seeing the same trend as in Brothers In Arms. The Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe again takes the lead by a wide margin (around 6 fps) This games is still too much at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 for the card.

Conclusion:

Price, performance and silence - what more can anyone ask from the Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe. While there are some nitpicks with this card, the whole package is solid and Gigabyte truly delivers. Not only are we seeing the same level of performance (or even faster), we have a GeForce 6600GT that's slightly cheaper equipped with a flexible cooling solution. Truly, if you're searching for two cards for an SLI setup, what the Gigabyte GeForce 66600GT Silent Pipe offer is unique. Of course, you can still run any other GeForce 6600GT with the same clock (560 MHz), but you still have to pay more for a silent solution - Gigabyte is using Zalman's GeForce 6600Gt cooler on this card. But that's the point, with this card you get all that, by paying less.

Go to top