San Jose (CA) - Nvidia officially announced its second model line of the Geforce 6 series today. Two new products, the 6600 and 6600 GT, aim at the mainstream segment with expected street prices of $200 and $150.

So far, Nvidia's announcement is just that. The message from the firm's headquarters in San Jose is a confirmation of the rumors in recent weeks, that the company will expand its product offering around the new Geforce 6 architecture.

According to Nvidia, the 6600 and 6600 GT will become available from at least 20 board manufacturers, including AOpen, Chaintech, Gainward, Gigabyte, Leadtek and PNY late September as well as system builders including Acer, Alienware, Fujitsu-Siemens, Medion, NEC, TigerDirect and VoodooPC in fall.

The new GPUs a significant part of the 6800 feature set at a lower price point. Nvidia said that the 6600 support Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and integrate Ultrashadow II technology. According to the firm, the 6600GT is capable of running Doom 3 in 42 frames a second at a 1600 x 1200 x 32 setting.

The main difference between the 6600GT and the 6600 is support for SLI multi-GPU technology and support for GDDR3 graphics memory of the higher end GT model. Both products come with 128 MByte memory.

Source : Tom's Hardware US