Introduction

The scene begins with NVIDIA personnel walking out onto a dark stage at North America's largest LAN gaming event, Quakecon, in the year 2004. The lights go up and the screen shines with an image of the first PCIe-only video card, the 6600 GT. Accompanying their flagship for the midrange graphics cards is the 6600. It is hard to believe that over a year has passed since the world moved from AGP to PCIe, not to mention how it wasn't long ago that we all felt that 3 vertex shaders and 8 pixel shaders was to die for. The $149-$179 price range was close to the heart of gamers, as they could begin to adopt PCIe for their gaming systems.

NVIDIA has taken that same core and performed a bit of cosmetic surgery to produce an even faster version of their beloved 6600. The core upgrade was complimented with an upgrade of its own. While the original 6600 was equipped with GDDR1 on a 128 bit bus, NVIDIA has now paired the core with cheaper, yet faster, DDR2. The new model from XFX is the PV-T43P-UDS7. The lengthy product name describes that it is using NVIDIA's new design with the brand name of GeForce 6600, with DDR2 memory.