Going dual is cool with four monitors

The Card

Leadtek has gone with a reference board design and like many manufacturers has decided to go with their own heatsink/fan unit.

The fan radius is larger than the one found on the reference design and an added bonus is that it subjectively sounds quieter.

Unlike the AGP variants of the 6600GT, the PCIe ones that we have run into so far have all opted to go with a VGA/DVI combination instead of dual DVI.

2ns GDDR3 Samsung modules populate the WinFast 6600GT TDH Leadtek card. The rest of the card is pretty no-frills - there are no LEDs, no RAM sinks, no fancy PCB color - just the bare basics.

Leadtek is more generous on the bundle side.

Full copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia are included for the gamers.

Amazingly enough, Pandora Tomorrow comes on a DVD instead of the multiple CDs like the retail version.

Leadtek's WinFox Utility and Intervideo's WinFast DVD are two of the highlights in the software package.

A dongle that provides HD, SVIDEO and RCA output is provided along with a DVI->VGA converter for those not sucked in by the marketing literature of LCDs yet.

For the first-timer, Leadtek includes a manual that goes into some more detail than some of the one page sheets that we've seen around lately.

Specifications

	5700U	5950	6600	6600GT	6800	6800 GT	6800 Ultra
Architecture	NV3x	NV3x	NV4x	NV4x	NV4x	NV4x	NV4x
Manufacturing Process	0.13	0.13	0.11	0.11	0.13	0.13	0.13
Transistor Count	82M	130M	146M	146M	220M	220M	220M
Pipelines	4	4	8	8	12	16	16
TMUs/Pipe	1	2	1	1	1	1	1
Clockspeed	475	450	300	500	325	350	400
Fillrate (Megapixels)	1900	1800	2400	4000	3900	5600	6400
Memory Interface	128-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Size	128	256	128	128	128	256	256
SLI-Capable	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

The 6600GT is the slowest card in the GeForce 6 family that supports SLI but slow is relative - it is easily the fastest card presently available in the $200 price range (though there will be a good amount of pressure that will be put on it should ATI get the X800 to the market in volume).

The 6600GT compares favorably to the 6800 - the only thing that holds it back somewhat is the memory interface which has been sliced to 128-bit compared to the 6800 series.

Overclocking

We had some pretty good success with the overclocking.

The Leadtek SLI pair was able to stay stable at a 580 Mhz core clock and 1.16 Ghz on the memory clock.

Pushing the core further resulted in artifacting.

This bodes well for those looking to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of their cards as our success with the 3D1 was a bit on the limited side.

Conclusions

Leadtek has gone with the no frills reference board approach on the hardware side with their WinFast PX6600GT TDH.

Their fan choice is a step above the reference solution with a slightly greater diameter but subjectively slightly lower volume.

For those fussy end users who like to see copper heatsinks, funky PCB colors and LEDs, the WinFast card will probably not be their first choice.

For those that have not picked up either Pandora Tomorrow or Prince of Persia , the PX6600GT is a nice bonus on the software side as Leadtek has thrown in full versions of both games.

One of the big draws for the PX6600GT and the 6600GT line up in general is the ability to SLI a pair of cards.

As we have seen from our benchmark results, there are tangible performance differences and the biggest gains will be in applications that are heavily video bound like Halo and DOOM 3 .

For all games that support SLI there will be some degree of difference.

Something that not all the benchmarks show is how much the 6600GT SLI pair can improve the minimum framerate - this can be clearly seen in our FRAPS run through of a DOOM 3 level.

The dips that were seen with a 6800GT get largely smoothed out with the Leadtek 6600GT pair but this is not apparent in the average framerate.

We have no reason to suspect that this is not the case in other video limited situations and we would suggest that a 6600GT SLI will provide better minimum framerates in those cases.

However, there are three situations where the 6600GT SLI setup is not as useful as a single 6800GT solution

• the processor bound scenario: Because there is an overhead to SLI, in a processor bound situation the frame rate will be lower than a single card solution.

  This does not really matter when the game is pulling 200FPS in a scene and is processor bound - it matters when the processor is needed to do complicated AI work or physics or whatever else and the framerate is already relatively low.

• the physical card memory limitation: the current implementation of SLI has the same data set sent to both cards which means that the same geometry and the same textures are loaded onto both cards which means that memory is being wasted.

  A 128MB+128MB SLI solution is not as flexible as a single 256MB card.

  This can be seen in several benchmarks where the frame rates drop sharply at 1280x1024 with AA/AF and above.

  This may become more relevant as games like DOOM 3 can take advantage of a full 256MB card (even 512MB if Ultra-High resolution textures are selected)

• compatibility - as we mentioned, SLI is not automatically enabled for all games.

  The HardOCP article shows that NVIDIA should be remedying this situation with an updated driver release but they do mention that SLI will be disabled on games that have issues with it.

  This means that ultimately, it is up to NVIDIA or the developer to resolve these issues

A single Leadtek 6600GT provides for some great performance today and there is no doubt that a second 6600GT down the road would be a pretty good upgrade option as the 6600GT SLI pair is in theory more powerful than a single 6800GT.

It may also be the case that NVIDIA narrows down the performance hit further.

For those that are debating whether a single 6800GT is a better purchase than a pair of 6600GT, the answer to that is not as clear cut and the situations outlined above should merit some thought.

A quick search on PriceGrabber has the Leadtek PX6600GT show up under the $200 SRP that NVIDIA has set, which should make it pretty competitive against other cards.

Something that we would like to see from Leadtek and other manufacturers would be the option buy a stripped down second card that comes with nothing but the card to reduce the price and offer the end user even more incentive to go for a 6600GT SLI setup over the 6800GT.