Asus has always packaged its products well; after all they've had 20-years in the industry. Asus is arguably the pioneer of OEM PC-component manufacturers providing motherboard alternatives before most gamer's were born and most were hanging off their mommies apron strings or having strained peaches wiped from their chubby little cheeks. Opening the box everything you need is included; its form-fitted cardboard interior simply and effectively secures your precious cargo so it arrives unscathed.



An extensive software bundle is included with a copy of the NovaLogic game Joint operations Typhoon Rising.



The Asus Extreme N6600GT Series box lists all accouterments, specifications and software bundled. Foremost the card is based on PCI Express, offers DVI-I, VGA and TV out as well as supporting HDTV and Dual VGA. Based on the Geforce 6600GT (NV43) the card offers 256MB of GDDR3 memory (to be discussed in detail in the next section) and is SLI compatible.



Many cards offer pointless software bundles, games are nice but most essential to the PC-Enthusiast and hard-core gamer (even those on a budget) are in-depth monitoring software. Asus offers a software/hardware monitoring utility in Asus Smart Doctor. This features on-screen real-time GUI with additional an overclocking card monitoring feature known as HyperDrive.



Game Face and Video Security are valuable for those whom play on-line, I found the Smart Doctor utility most impressive based on its ability to monitor the GPU as well as the memory. Many utilities will simply monitor the GPU as it's more costly to manufacture a PCB with memory sensors. Smart Doctor was too difficult to capture with MWSnap so I took snapshots of the non-active screens which gives a better indication of the software features.





I was honestly under the impression Game face Live would be just another useless feature tossed in by the marketing guru's to give the impression gamers were getting something. After overlooking the utility I found it's quite useful and I can see where it would make gaming online so much easier and safer. Asus describes the feature as:







Asus Video Security is an utility which monitors online activity while using video capture devices, such as any significant change in the data etc. Asus describes this utility as follows:







Specifications:

Asus EN6600GT







Onto the hardware, where the rubber meets the road ->