Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT Silent Pipe
PCI Express x16 graphics cardsChipset 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 DDR3Core 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.
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