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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.

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