Overclocking Comparison

With overclocking, every GPU is different, so a side effect of looking at this is that we get a good idea of how the 6600GT will overclock in a general sense. We can't really say that all Albatron cards will overclock by 90MHz. Believe us when we say that if they all would run at that speed, they would all be running at that speed and out-selling the competition. There are a lot of factors that go into it. That's why we base most of our recommendation and ranking decisions on cooling and noise levels rather than overclocking. It is still a factor though.

Core Clock Speed

Those with a calculator handy will notice that the mean median and standard deviation are:

Mean: 568.10
Median: 571
Std. Dev.: 17.1840

Knowing NVIDIA, QA is going to assure that chips leaving labs will run at a little higher than stock clock speeds. This translates to a little bit of breathing room. What we pull away from this testing is that we expect Geforce 6600GT's to achieve a minium 7% overclock. A 9% to 12% overclock should be possible to most people who decide to own this card. Beyond that is icing on the cake. Of course, we are working with a very small sample size and we don't know much about the population as a whole either. We would have been more comfortable making predictions had this data looked more like a bell curve, but what we see is a little too flat for us to say anything with any statistical confidence.

Our memory clock speed graph shows Sparkle on top, but that's 2ns RAM on a 110MHz overclock. The XFX RAM is running 1.6ns RAM at a 10MHz overclock. This could be really lucky for Sparkle, but it isn't likely to happen on most boards. A 22% memory overclock, even with the added features of GDDR3, is still tough to pull off, especially when the 1.6ns memory only matched its performance. Inno3D also uses 1.6ns memory, but our final overclock ended up lower than the 600MHz that should have been possible with this part.

All the other solutions are 2ns memories which overclock between 50 and 100MHz. All the memories we looked at on 6600 GT boards are Samsung GDDR3 solutions.

Mem Clock Speed

The Test Overclocked Doom 3 Performance
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  • princethorpe - Wednesday, May 4, 2005 - link

    I've been checking the various forums and found thisone on the 6600gt's excellent. I don't know if anyone else has found them but Asus are making these cards and do a faster than standard model by using faster memory they recon according to their site they run 10% faster than the standard. I've ordered the Asus board by preference because of the build quality
  • GollumSmeagol - Monday, May 2, 2005 - link

    I came across a forum a few months ago here in Hungary, and the people were talking about Leadtek's 6600GTs being faulty/freezing. Strange enough, a few weeks later, the main distributor of Leadtek, took off 6600GTs from their pricelists on the web. Wonder if they are waiting for a bugfix, or simply ran out of stock and wait for the next shipment.

    Another beauty I've just came across, is Gigabyte's TurboForce edition, which is a slightly overclocked version of the 6600 series (both PCI-Ex and AGP 8x). I'm shopping for a SILENT AGP one, (that's where I came across this review), and found this beauty

    http://www.giga-byte.com/VGA/Products/Products_GV-...

    This one has sg. they call Silent-Pipe as a cooler. Not much specs on Gigabyte's page, but from the picture, it looks like there is no fan at all, just a huge copper(-colored?) heatsink, that covers about 2/3rd of the card. (Well, a Zalman FB123 could still be used to move some air)
    The memory clock is wrote to be 1120MHz (remember, TurboForce), plus when I zoomed in on to the box picture, I could spot "VIVO" written on the box. This is also supported by the info on the local dealer's page, where they say "Y" to the TV-OUT of the regular GV-N66T128D, but they say "IN/OUT" for the GV-N66T128VP. All this for roughly 20 USD extra (local price).
  • dpp - Saturday, November 19, 2005 - link

    I've bought http://www.giga-byte.com/VGA/Products/Products_GV-...">Gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP (TurboForce, no fan at all)
    Start up temperature 52C, maximum 65C.
    Is that normal?
  • ylp88 - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link

    I found the article quite informative. Thank you. I purchased two Palit 6600GT cards a week ago and have put them in SLI mode.

    I have a few questions/comments:
    1) The Palit overview is rather short compared to the others. The Palit card is also never mentioned on the last page. Is there a reason for this?
    2) The Palit cards I got DO NOT have memory heatsinks as indicted on the photo for the Palit card. The memory remins cool, however.

    Thanks again for the article.

    ylp88
  • zexe - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link

    Do not go for XFX 6600GT !!!!
    The card is NOT longer equipped with 1.6ns
    The chips on my card are Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20
    THAT MEANS 2.ms !!!
  • zexe - Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - link

  • marketmuse - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link

    does anyone know the difference between the Leadtek A6600GT and PX6600GT, besides the PCI-E and AGP?

    I'm looking to purchase a A6600GT, but I don't know if it will have the same performance as the PX version.

    Thanks
    MM
  • Monypennyuk - Monday, March 14, 2005 - link

    Hello all.

    WOW a great review site.:)

    Just one problem. I was having problems deciding between two of these cards on the ebuyer.co.uk site.

    PNY Verto GeForce 6 6600GT AGP8x £119

    or

    Inno 3D 128MB GeForce 6600 GT 8xAGP TV-Out DVI DirectX9 £116

    This review does not mention the PNY version. although i now notice that they have the LEADTEK at about the same price. Going by these comments i GUESS i should get the LEADTEk??? Anyone know about the PNY cos my mate rekons thats the better one...

    Leadtek Winfast Geforce 6600 Gt128mb Ddr3 Agp Dvi-i Tv-out £117.

    Any help much appreciated.

    A

  • BlackMamba - Tuesday, March 8, 2005 - link

    #75: That link to MSI is for the AGP version (note the sink for the bridge chip).

    Not sure if they've fixed the problems with the PCI-E version, and would also like to know.
  • JensErik - Tuesday, March 1, 2005 - link

    Looking at the pictures of the MSI card in the review and the pics at MSI's page it seems that MSI has changed the a lot on their card, including the HSF.

    (Check it out here: http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/vga/vga/pro...

    Does anyone know if this has solved the HSF mounting problem encountered in the test??

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