Introduction

With the introduction of PCI express (PCIe) a lot of high end graphic cards entered the market. Cards valued at least over 500 euro. Now that the rush for such a new platform has dropped to a lower level, VGA card manufacturers started to bring out more and more budget minded cards.

While I was looking at the online shops for a new card for my brand new nForce 4 based AMD 939 setup, my eye spotted the Gigabyte 6600 256 Mb Turbo Force. All big names such as Nvidia 6600, 256 Mb, Turbo Force. Marketing talk I thought. So why not buy it and make a review of it?

Comtech was so kind to borrow us two other VGA cards. The Asus 6600GT and the Asus X800XT. This way I had some cards in my possession with a different price range. To give you an idea, at the time of writing these were the average pricings:

6600 = low end = $100

6600GT = mid end = $170-200

X800XT = high end = $450-500

This data will be the red line through this article.



You can see that a 6600GT based VGA card costs ~1.7 times more. And the X800XT will empty your wallet even 4.5 times more. But is the performance increase similar? That's the question I asked myself while writing this short review.

Just a few different tests should be enough to show the trend in this analysis.



Let's start by presenting today’s contestants.

NVIDIA 6600 Chipset



Gigabyte 6600 specifications

It costs a tad more then the average 6600 based card, because it has more (and faster) memory, but also a higher clocked core. Hence the Turbo Force part in the name. The Gigabyte comes with a fancy passive cooled heat-pipe heatsink, whisper quiet.



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NVIDIA 6600 GT Chipset



Asus 6600 GT specifications

The 6600 GT was and still is a very popular solution for the mid end market. Priced attractively and delivering decent power, it has found its place in many computers. And with the capability of SLI, you can increase performance enormously if you have the right motherboard.


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ATI X800XT Chipset



Asus X800XT specifications

The last card in today's test session is based on ATI's X800XT chip. Until recently (before the X850 series) it was top of the bill in ATI's camp. So we have high expectations. Also considered the price it should deliver some amazing results. I hope...



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Let’s compare their specifications:

	Asus EN6600GT/TOP/TD/128M	Asus EAX800XT 2DT/P/256	Gigabyte GV-NX66256DP
Chipset	Nvidia 6600 GT	Ati X800 XT	Nvidia 6600
Memory	128 Mb DDR3	256 Mb DDR3	256 Mb DDR
Memory Clock	1000 Mhz	1000 Mhz	500 Mhz
Core Clock	500 Mhz	500 Mhz	450 Mhz
Buswidth	128 Bit	256 Bit	128 Bit
Pixel Pipes	8	16	8