Overclocking
We took the 6600 and tried to see what kind of overclocking we could do with it. The card already pulls in some good numbers, and at only $99, it is a really good solution already. However, we added the Coolbits registry tweak to the driver and unlocked the clock frequency adjustment sliders. Overclocking voids your warranty and can shorten the lifespan of your hardware. (You already know this, but we have to do our due diligence each and every article just in case you forgot or more importantly, to warn someone who might be toying with overclocking for the first time.) For the tests, we used the aluminum cooler that came on the XFX 6600 with DDR2 graphics card.
The NVIDIA reference design standard is 350 MHz core and 800 MHz (DDR) for the memory. XFX was already pushing the core 50 MHz over spec, but we were able to get the card's core up to 537 MHz and the memory up to 988 MHz (DDR). That is a 23.5% overclock on the memory and an astounding 34% overclock on the core. This let us obtain a score of 3,678 using the default settings in 3DMark 2005, which is a 23.8% score increase. This is very nice result for a user that wants to overclock the card to yield higher frame rates.
