Good 3D Performance at a Middling Price: GeForce 6600 Shootout

Gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP

Gigabyte supplied a purely passively-cooled GeForce 6600 GT card for this test: the GV-NX66T128XP. If the passive cooling led you to expect a somewhat slow card, you will be pleasantly surprised. Gigabyte sticks to NVIDIA's default graphics processor clock rate speed of 500 MHz, but at 1120 MHz it sets the clock rate of the memory considerably higher. This is facilitated by the particularly fast Samsung 1.6ns GDDR memory modules.

The passive cooler of the NX66T consists of three parts. On the front of the card there is a large heatsink, which diverts the waste heat via a heat pipe to another passive heatsink above the board. A third cooler is attached to the back of the card. Unlike Albatron, the designers have taken into consideration the difficulties of installing coolers on the back of various motherboards and left sufficient space underneath. Even with the very high Northbridge cooler of our Intel D925XCV test motherboard, there were no installation problems.