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Graphics Software Upgrades Hardware Entertainment Games

Reviews Arrive For nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP 184

Posted by timothy from the if-this-is-cheap-I'll-take-the-lobster dept.
bhtooefr writes "The Tech Report got their hands on a reference board of the nV 6600GT AGP, and did some benchmarks. Interestingly, even with a slower memory clock on the AGP card, it was FASTER in some benchmarks than the PCI-E card. Tests performed were: Doom 3, CS:Source, Far Cry, 3DMark05, Rome: Total War, and Xpand Rally (the last two tested with FRAPS)." pacmanfan contributes links to more reviews at Extreme Tech, Hard OCP and PC Perspective.
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Reviews Arrive For nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP More

Reviews Arrive For nVidia GeForce 6600GT AGP

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  • Speed isn't the main reason for PCI-Express (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DamienMcKenna ( 181101 ) <damienNO@SPAMmc-kenna.com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:05AM (#10841523)
    The main reason I see to move to PCI Express is that it is a fully open standard by the PCI Consortium, rather than AGP which is an Intel trade secret. It is because of this that AMD had horrible AGP support for a long time, but with the open standard that is PCI-Express everyone wins.

    Plus you can daisy-chain multiple PCI-E cards for SLI, which is neat.

    Damien

    • Need the bus bandwidth though (Score:5, Interesting)

      by orthancstone ( 665890 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:09AM (#10841559)
      Mobo manufacturers still need to up the PCI-E bus bandwidth before we can daisy chain though. Right now there just isn't enough space for two cards, let alone two cards and other addons.

      • Re:Need the bus bandwidth though (Score:5, Informative)

        by KZigurs ( 638781 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:29AM (#10841717)
        On the other hand on some of the benchmarks I have seen that card is being run with 4x or even 1x PCIe bus, without any serious performance degradation, so, rather logically, this isn't the issue jet.

        The lack of PCIe lanes to accomodate a lot of cards without tricks and headaches, yet is. But this is configuration issue, not bandwidth.

        • Mod Parent Up (Score:5, Informative)

          by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:55AM (#10842447)
          The parent is spot-on. Current AGP 8x bandwidth is 8x(266*8, 2128MB/sec), but the performance difference between 4x(266*4, 1064MB/sec) and 8x is negligable(around a percent, within experimental error). Considering that x1 PCIe is 250MB/sec, PCIe and AGP are effectively running at the same speed given the same multiplier. If you take in to consideration that we just said that we aren't making use of anything past AGP 4x yet, it's a logical assumption that PCIe x4 should also be enough, and that x8 would be enough for the next generation of cards that would somehow need the doubled bandwidth.

          But getting back to the point, the current PCIe graphics standard is x16, which at 4GB/sec(and this is each way, BTW - PCIe is full duplex, AGP is half) is far more than we need. The current solution of dividing up the 16 lanes from that single slot in to 2 groups of 8 lanes for 2 PCIe x8 slots(though using an x16 connector for power issues) still results in each card recieving more bandwidth than it can effectively use. With a single x16 slot, PCIe is future-proof enough that bandwidth won't be an issue for some long period of time, and than the x8 SLI solution won't be bandwidth limited for some shorter, but still long enough period of time that it's not going to be a realistic issue until at least the 3rd or 4th generation PCIe motherboard chipsets are released, at which point they can be built with more lanes.
          • Are you people suggesting waiting for next generation PCI-express to invest your money again?! I know PCIe is relatively new, and I waited long enough before AGP 4x was the motherboard standard. Is it safe to say that in another year... many motherboards will have multiple PCIe slots for SLI if needed? AGP IMHO exploded onto the scene over the original PCI. Even with all my research, I am having a hard time seeing the growth of PCIe right now.

            • Are you people suggesting waiting for next generation PCI-express to invest your money again?! I know PCIe is relatively new, and I waited long enough before AGP 4x was the motherboard standard. Is it safe to say that in another year... many motherboards will have multiple PCIe slots for SLI if needed? AGP IMHO exploded onto the scene over the original PCI. Even with all my research, I am having a hard time seeing the growth of PCIe right now.

              No, the "next generation PCI-express" is a long way off - PCIe i

    • Re:Speed isn't the main reason for PCI-Express (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:32AM (#10841733)
      that's one of the main reasons, but it's not the main reason. the biggest reason that PCI Express is a lot cheaper to produce, which everyone loves (PCI Express is serial, AGP is parallel, AGP requires more connections between the card and the chipset on the motherboard, making it a lot more expensive than PCI Express for motherboard manufacturers). second of all, 3D hardware manufacturers love it because it isn't a bidirectional bus like AGP, where you have a single bus that typically moves data in a single direction but can move it in the opposite direction with a huge performance penalty. PCI Express is two unidirectional buses, so there's no penalty for reading from the video card. this means you can do all sorts of nutty effects and use the GPU as an extra processor in some applications a lot more effectively than you can with AGP.

      your logic doesn't hold up, considering the Athlon64 has no PCI Express motherboard quite yet. sure, they've been announced, but they do not have any in retail. PCI Express was an Intel-led push, along with DDR2 and BTX (although we haven't really seen the last yet). it is simply much cheaper and much easier to manufacture than AGP. I mean, SLI was theoretically possible with AGP3.0 (introduced AGP8x, but it also had support for multiple AGP devices on a single motherboard). there were absolutely no motherboards, to my knowledge, that supported multiple AGP cards, certainly not in the consumer space. given NVIDIA's recent SLI push and ATI's forthcoming SLI chipsets, both would have hopped on AGP-based SLI if it were available. I'd guess that it was simply too expensive to make motherboards with multiple AGP slots more than anything else. with PCI Express, this limitation is gone.
    • I gotta say what you really want is HyperTransport [hypertransport.org].

      But I guess an improvement is still an improvement.

    • Re:Speed isn't the main reason for PCI-Express (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Plus you can daisy-chain multiple PCI-E cards for SLI, which is neat.
      You can also have multiple AGP ports on a motherboard too, just AFAIK nobody has chosen to do it.

    • The main reason I see to move to PCI Express is that it is a fully open standard by the PCI Consortium, rather than AGP which is an Intel trade secret.

      That would have been a really relevant objection to AGP about seven years ago.

      It is because of this that AMD had horrible AGP support for a long time, but with the open standard that is PCI-Express everyone wins.

      I don't know how long Athlon machines have been working fine with AGP, probably at least since the cache coherency problems were addressed over 3

  • Aww crap (Score:2, Redundant)

    by swv3752 ( 187722 )
    Just when I break down and buy a Geforce FX5900XT, they come out with an AGP version of the 6600.

    • Re:Aww crap (Score:2, Insightful)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )
      Dude, don't you even read up before you buy PC hardware?
    • Dude, you should keep a tab or two on the community, then you won't miss these things.

      This card has been antcipated for nearly a month.

      I have been waiting for one of two things to upgrade for HL2:

      * A 6600GT AGP
      * An Athlon64 939 PCIe board

      The 6600GT AGP won. I ordered my new system last night. And yes, kids, you can buy these in stores NOW.
      • Actually, I upgraded about 3-4 weeks ago. I knew that 6600 AGp would eventually be available, but was getting really fed up with my Radeon 7500.

      • The 6600GT AGP won. I ordered my new system last night. And yes, kids, you can buy these in stores NOW.

        Could I ask where? I've just bought HL2, and my Ti 4600 needs an upgrade...

    • Re:Aww crap (Score:2, Informative)

      by Deekin_Scalesinger ( 755062 )
      I got that exact card last week. I read several reviews on it and got one built by MSI for about $200 from newegg. With WHQL drivers, I run Doom3 on high wih no hiccups, Desert Combat final runs great on high, Far Cry demo looks good. I run 3dmark, Aquamark, etc once or twice for curiosity's sakes, but numbers don't mean as much to me as smooth gameplay on the titles I own. This card certianly does, and should hopefully keep me happy for the next couple of years.

  • 9800Pro vrs newer cards (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jumbo Jimbo ( 828571 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:11AM (#10841579)
    The benchmarks show the 9800 pro in the tables with the newer cards. The results aren't quite as impressive but it's still in the same league, and for half the price I think it will be the card of choice for a while.

    By the time thr prices drop there will be more information like this article on the differences / advantages of PCI-E over AGP. Think I'll wait until then before deciding on an upgrade.

    • Re:9800Pro vrs newer cards (Score:5, Informative)

      by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:19AM (#10841647) Homepage
      Actually a 9800pro runs about $200 which is about what the 6600 costs. And the 9800 was not keeping up with the 6600.
      • Also, nVidia's Linux support is far superior.

      • Actually a 9800pro runs about $200 which is about what the 6600 costs. And the 9800 was not keeping up with the 6600.

        I paid $130 for one recently, after a $50 "trade-up" and an online coupon on the ATI site. Sent them a crappy old card I wasn't using anymore. The nice thing about that program is that they credit your card as soon as they get your trade, rather than doing a lame rebate thing. I did have to wait a few weeks for the card, since they were backordered.

        Since it's an older card and Christmas is

      • Pricewatch is listing the 256MB 6600 for around $150

        http://www.pricewatch.com/h/prc.aspx?i=37&a=1431 68 &f=1

        Also.. I have a 9800 Pro and am disappointed with the quality of the drivers. Lots of quirks and the latest version crashed my machine in the middle of gameplay. Never so many issues with all the Nvidia cards I had before.
  • AFAIR the first agp/4x/8x cards and boards were a bit slower then the former generation interface, so maybe we should let the technology mature for a bit...

    On the other hand Extremetech's review find the PCIe version much faster, so it might be a configuration issue...

  • What a minute! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:19AM (#10841646)
    They got "Rome: Total War" to run? Wow!
    • What's the joke? It runs fine on my son's K7S5A 1.0 Mobo, 512mb pc3200 with a radeon 9700 pro. And it ran ok, but slow when he had 512 pc133 sdram and a 8500le before he upgraded.

  • More (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dfj225 ( 587560 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:24AM (#10841679) Homepage Journal
    Lets not forget AnandTech's review either http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2277 [anandtech.com]

    I think this card is a great one, but it looks like most store are marking it up too much. I think it should retail for around $200, but the cheapest I have found it is $220 with most store on the web hovering around $250. This card needs to be at $200 since vanilla 6800s can be found for $250. I'm looking for a new card myself, and this is definetly on the top of my list. The only thing holding me back is the possibility that I might be able to get a 9800 Pro for $150 from a friend.

    • Re:More (Score:3, Insightful)

      by supabeast! ( 84658 )
      Keep in mind that this card was just released yesterday, and is in short supply. Give it a month and it will be right where the PCI-E cards are price wise, which is about $135 on Pricewatch.
      • Yes, I realize that prices will probably stabilize for this very new card in a few weeks. I doubt it will drop to $135 in a month (I'm seeing around $180 for PCI-E 6600GTs...the vanilla 6600s seem to be closer to $135). The funny thing is yesterday I was curious so I checked the price on New Egg and watched it start at $225 go up to $235 and then $245 where it sits now. Should have stayed with $225 if you ask me :) In all honesty, if I'm going to buy a card I want it as soon as possible to make my Half-
      • Um $178 American, $135 is the 6600 vanilla.
    • Keep in mind that the only models on the market right now are the more-high-end brands that come with a lot of extras (game bundles and whatnot) and generally charge a $20+ premium over a more basic OEM card. Give it a week or two for a few more companies to start shipping card & you'll be able to pick up one for $20-30 less.

      Also, remember that you're looking at the 6600GT - the faster version of the 6600 & comparing it to the vanilla 6800. When the vanilla 6600 comes to AGP, we should be able t

  • About Time (AGP) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:24AM (#10841683) Homepage
    A video card that will easily play Doom3 and HL2 and cost around $200. Of course this card has been out for awhile...but few people have a PCI-e board (Now it's a viable AGP upgrade).

    Also worth noting is that the 6600 offers full support for Shader Model 3.0 and DirectX 9.0C, ATI does not currently offer support for this yet.

  • SLI is where its at (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BobRooney ( 602821 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:28AM (#10841716) Homepage
    Even if the AGP version of the 6600GT outperforms the PCI express version slightly, there is still the value of the PCI ex version to function on the new SLI boards, whenever they come out.

    The 6600 cards are pretty reasonably priced, so picking up two of them and getting 180% performance of a single 6600GT AGP is pretty attractive and a sufficient reason to drool over the new NForce4 boards(for the AMD enthusiasts among us).

    The Current intel boards with SLI are considerably more expensive than the new NForce4 boards figure to be, so while there is still a few weeks till I can get my hands on one, I can't wait to get a pair of 6600GTs running in SLI mode with a respectable AMD 64 chip.

    • Re:SLI is where its at (Score:5, Informative)

      by hobuddy ( 253368 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:27AM (#10842179)

      The 6600 cards are pretty reasonably priced, so picking up two of them and getting 180% performance of a single 6600GT AGP is pretty attractive...

      No, it isn't. According to reputable benchmarks [anandtech.com], dual 6600 GTs ($200 x 2) typically perform slightly worse than a single 6800 GT ($400 x 1).

      Why would you accept the undoubtedly higher power consumption of dual 6600 GTs versus a single 6800 GT, when the price is about the same?

      Those who can afford a new motherboard (and probably a new CPU) just for the SLI capability won't be stooping to 6600 GTs; they'll opt for something better.

      • The reason you would NOT opt for a single 6800GT is that the performance of a SINGLE 6800 is substantially less than DUAL 6600s. Maybe not an order of magnitude of difference, but the a reasonable estimate would certainly be at least a 50% jump over a stock, single 6800GT The 6600Gts are availalbe at ~180 on pricewatch btw

        • The reason you would NOT opt for a single 6800GT is that the performance of a SINGLE 6800 is substantially less than DUAL 6600s.

          Bullshit! I certainly haven't seen any benchmarks that support your assertion. Did you even look at the benchmarks I linked to? In most cases, dual 6600 GTs perform slightly worse than a single 6800 GT.

      • Re:SLI is where its at (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pyrros ( 324803 )
        Amen to that, and before anybody says 'you buy an motherboard that supports SLI, get one 6600 @ $200 now then add a second one when you need more speed', you'll probably have a hard time tracking down the exact same model 18 months later, not to mention you might be better off selling your old card, and just buying whatever mid-range is polpular then.

        You'll probably come on top performance-wise and you won't have to pay the extra $$ for an SLI motherboard. From what I've seen, if you want a motherboard tha
      • 6600 GT PCI-E costs more like $150 each, not $200... see pricewatch. The 6800 GT costs around $350 on pricewatch. So it works out about $50 cheaper, with the ability to pay $150 now, and $100 in 6 months (perhaps even $75 in 6 months). It will not be hard to find a matching model in only 6 months, and you will get a significant 50% boost in speed. Total price with the split purchase will likely be under $250, for equivalent speed. In 6 months, the 6800 GT will probably still cost over $250, judging from pas

  • 6800 (Score:1)

    by dlZ ( 798734 )
    I purchased a AGP 6800 for my gaming box, and haven't been disappointed yet. I haven't tried it under RedHat yet, I'm still trying to decide if I want to upgrade to FC3 or not. As long as it plays UT 2004 with everything cranked under XP and RedHat, I'll be a happy camper. I'd love to pick up a PCI Express based motherboard, but still nothing out for my 64 yet.
  • It seems Nvidia has been pushing their PCI-E cards, which haven't really found any foothold in the market. Who wants to buy a new motherboard for a few extra frames per second?

    If you want performance without paying $400+ for something like the 6800/x800, the 6600 is for you. This is the card us cheap-thrill monkeys have been drooling over. The only bad thing I can say about this card, is that it hasn't come out sooner - Half Life 2 is running mighty poorly on my Ti4200.

    Nvidia really would've cleane
    • HL2 drags a bit on my new rig with a 6600GT (PCI-E), and it would have been murder on on my old machine with a Radeon 9k. I'm just wondering what the folks who got the free copy of HL2 with their Radeon 9200 and 9600's think. :-p

      Interestingly enough, though, I can run CS:S at a higher res, and it's silky-smooth with the new card.

      Still, it's all about DOD:S. When, oh, when will that be out, so I can get away from the little bitches playing CS?
      • I'm running my free copy of HL2 on my 9600 pro all-in-wonder. I've got it slightly overclocked (~10%). I'm running at 1280x1024 with all the graphics turned to high except anti-aliasing (2x) and filtering (trilinear). It's very playable.
    • As I plan on acquiring HL2 and playing on my Ti4200. It just annoys me to no end that you can buy a really fast cpu, a nice big hard drive, or many other quality computer items for ~100 but when it comes to video cards your always looking at $175-$200 for anything that will last a few years.

  • Toms sticking to its guns (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Derkec ( 463377 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @09:40AM (#10841780)
    Interesting to note that Toms hasn't posted on this yet. I wonder how long they will take to get it to the review done to their satisfaction? Good for them.
  • where do I get that job. I'd like to do some professional 'testing' myself...
  • am I the only geek who does NOT play video/computergames?

    while I love seeing hardware reviews, there has GOT to be another way to test video cards other than playing games. fps and all the other game-centric metrics are completely useless to me.

    what other metrics can be applied to video cards?
    • Most other applications you could test video cards on are already performed with satisfaction by even the most basic video cards. 2D acceleration is handled well by cards that are vintage 1998, such as your ATI Rage Fury or NVidia Riva TNT2. Scrolling in web pages? Discrete graphics cards do just fine. 2D color quality, such as in Photoshop? If you're a demanding commercial user you don't look at these reviews, you'll likely buy something specific for your needs, such as Matrox. The only thing I can t

    • Re:I cant be the only one... (Score:5, Funny)

      by neko9 ( 743554 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:17AM (#10842105)
      am I the only geek who does NOT play video/computergames?

      yes.

      what other metrics can be applied to video cards?

      length. weight.
      • >what other metrics can be applied to video cards?
        >> length. weight.

        Temperature !!!
      • what other metrics can be applied to video cards?

        Noise, power consumption.

        Sadly, few people bother with those tests, which is really silly since I bought my last graphics card based on it being passively cooled.

        Oh, and even more sadly, the one game I play is a board game, and my GF4 (MX440) can't handle it with full antialiasing (http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/glgo/).

        It seems that on their cheap boards, nvidia are dropping more hardware optimisations in exchange for making the few they have fast.
    • If you don't care about gaming, then buy a Radeon 7000 for $30 and be happy. 2-D hasn't been a concern for, gosh, at least six or so years now. DVD playback isn't a concern anymore either. The only new non-gaming feature I can even think of is the MPEG-2 HDTV encoder/decoder on the Geforce 6x00 series.

    • No, of course you're not!

      The thing is, you're not a geek at all: put your tie back on and get back to the accounts department.

    • Heat and power consumption are other ways. There are also feature sets like outputs.

      For the media player folks you should also consider one of the newer video cards because Nvidia now has a DVD decoder out that uses the DirectX9 compatible cards to offload some of the calculations off of the CPU onto the video card GPU.

    • what other metrics can be applied to video cards?

      Milkdrop! Using my ATI 9600Pro at 32bit color and 1600x1200 resolution on one screen while playing full screen video on another simply rocks.

  • Card situation (Score:3, Informative)

    by Deliveranc3 ( 629997 ) <deliverance@NOSpaM.level4.org> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:11AM (#10842057) Journal
    I have an athlon 2600+ which was a great purchase.

    We all know that more cpu power isn't really needed right now. Because of this the idea of buying a new system to upgrade a graphics board seems silly, I have a 9000 pro which still runs everything quite well but could use an upgrade.

    So my options are to spend $300 cnd on a 9800 pro or 6800? Not the greatest options.

    I have the money but I'd rather not, plus if I'm going to buy such a high end card it really sucks I won't be able to put it into my next system.

    Most people are probably looking at the 939 platform as their next upgrade.

    As far as CPU's go, dual core is hitting in about a year. That's a significant upgrade, coupled with 64bit.

    So I mainly need a card to ease my current system out but which will have linux compatibility once it becomes my server, for that Nvidia is the best and a high end card won't do.

    Basically for anyone who wants to put another card in their computer this is the way to go. This is the perfect card and the fact that it was pciE only really really sucked.

    On the other hand both ATI and Nvidia should be looking at a new product cycle in febuary-april so you might want to hold out. But I get the feeling it'll be a 5800-5900 9800 pro to xt type cycle not a 8500 to 9700 type cycle.

    Partially due to no new technology like AA or DX9 coming out in the near future.

    The 8 pixel pipelines kinda hurts whereas the 6800 can have all 16 unlocked but that doesn't make these cards any less powerful and there should be plenty of power here till a pciE upgrade is required.

  • Not exactly surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:16AM (#10842091)
    PCI-Express reflects Intel's continuing obsession with bandwidth at the expense of latency. An AGP channel is inherently much lower latency than a PCIe channel regardless of how many PCIe lanes you may throw at it.

    Unfortunately for the PCIe users (and I am one, the new box that $EMPLOYER got me uses PCIe video) graphics are quite sensitive to latency.

    I'm one of the SPICE trolls at $EMPLOYER who developed the I/O stuff for both AGP and PCIe. For what it's worth, I won't be switching to PCIe until it looks like I don't have a choice.

    • Surely Bandwidth is more important for a video card. Doesn't the CPU just pump data at the video card. I can understand that things are a bit more complex, these days, but I thought that the driver would predict what the video card needs, and just send it in.

      Apologies if this sounds like nonsense

  • REASONS FOR AGP VERSIONS SPEED. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JollyFinn ( 267972 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @10:16AM (#10842097)
    Fast low latency chipset?
    Probably biggest reason for AGP version to beat the PCI-E version
    Drivers?

  • And a whopping total of... (Score:3, Funny)

    by charlesbakerharris ( 623282 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:12AM (#10842617)
    6 frames per second in The Sims 2, at least while you're moving the camera. Otherwise 160 FPS, when the camera is set. :)

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