is nvidia 6600 good?

[pc_boy]

I heard some of you say the nvidia 6600 is really good. Is that true? is it better than the 5900XT? I saw the 6600 on newegg for 160 bucks.

 

[jcline]

Yes, really good. Yes, better than the 5900 series. The only problem currently is that you will need to opt for the Intel platform as the Intel 9xx series chipsets are the only that support PCI-E.

Take a look at this article...

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2196
"The card consistently performs on par with some of the lower end high end cards (6800 and X800 Pro) at lower resolutions below 1600x1200 without AA and AF enabled."

 

[GameGURU]

Um...well it is PCi Ex which really wont be showing its stuff until SLI comes out.

 

[pc_boy]

I am afraid it sucks because it is a PCI card. And it looks really weak, I mean 300MHZ core and 550 Memory, neah, I don't think it is better than the 5900XT. So what do you guys recommend?

 

[SNiPeRViRuS]

it is. it has more pipelines.

 

[pc_boy]

so does that make it better than 5900XT even with the weaknesses it has?

 

[Nubius]

I am afraid it sucks because it is a PCI card. And it looks really weak, I mean 300MHZ core and 550 Memory, neah, I don't think it is better than the 5900XT. So what do you guys recommend?

Dude the 6600 series cards are PCI-EXPRESS not PCI, completely DIFFERENT slots that you are thinking of...not only that, but it is using completely different memory, GDDR3 opposed to GDDR2, so that gives it another leg up...on top of THAT, it does indeed have more pipelines like sniper pointed out.

When talking about it's core and memory speed, like I said, PCI-E is 16x unlike AGP which is 8x so there's double bandwidth right there......

It seems like you don't know much about the latest hardware thats out...they don't make a PCI slot 6600, they have a PCI-E based 6600 and you need to know those differences. AGP 6600's will be released late november, early december

so does that make it better than 5900XT even with the weaknesses it has?

It's WAY more powerful and doesn't have any weaknesses

 

[Apokalipse]

it performa bloody well, it beats the X800 Pro in a lot of tests, and the X800 Pro is ATI' second best card, when the 6600 is actually a mid-range card in its generation.
they will be releasing AGP 8x 6600's, and they will also be releasing socket 939 boards with PCI-E
PCI-E is differnet to PCI because it runs in a serial bus rather than a paralell bus. they did the same for the ATA interface, which is called SATA, and it does make it a lot faster

 

[Apokalipse]

When talking about it's core and memory speed, like I said, PCI-E is 16x unlike AGP which is 8x so there's double bandwidth right there......

actually, PCI-E 16x has not got 2x the bandwith as AGP 8x, in fact I think it's more
16x is twice the number of 8x, but AGP and PCI-E are measured differently
PCI-E 16x just means there are 16 channels going to the video card, whereas PCI-E 1x means 1 channel going to the card (you can't put video cards in 1x slots)
PCI-E 1x is 1GB/S transfer speed, although I'm not sure what AGP 8x is

 

[Nubius]

actually, PCI-E 16x has not got 2x the bandwith as AGP 8x, in fact I think it's more
16x is twice the number of 8x,

Well I didn't mean literally exactly double the bandwidth, I just meant, at a minimum, there's double the bandwidth without even considering the new architectures of the cards, motherboards, processors, etc... but good job on clarifying that apok

PCI-E 1x is 1GB/S transfer speed, although I'm not sure what AGP 8x is

Are you sure? I don't think you can just say 1x = 1gb/sec because the high end cards do like 35gb/sec data transfer...I'm just curious as I'm really not sure, so I'm not saying your info is wrong, more along the lines of exactly how accurate it is