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Introduction
The NV4x family has been received pretty warmly by enthusiasts so far with NVIDIA upping their earnings for Q3 2004 pretty significantly due to sales of 6800-based GPUs. One of the themes introduced back in April was the idea of a top to bottom line up of graphics chips based on the same architecture. At the high end was the 6800 series, and back in August, NVIDIA introduced their midrange card in the 6600GT. Midrange may be stretching it a bit as the 6600GT generally outperforms both the high end parts from the last generation in the 9800XT and the 5950 all at the magical 200$ price point. In any case, NVIDIA has released a very attractive part that seems to be generating quite a bit of buzz for good reason.
We first took a look at a 6600GT reference board several weeks ago - the consensus then was that it was fast and at the 200$ mark, it is by far the best DOOM3 card to get. The NV4x is no slouch though in other games either - all the criticisms of the NV3x family seem to have been addressed by NVIDIA in the NV4x family. Since the launch of the 6600GT, ATI has also released their midrange heavy hitter in the X700 series with both the Pro and XT competing in the same price segment. The 6600GT cards have started popping up on the Internet in the last couple weeks along with the X700 Pro. Today we take a look at Gigabyte's implementation of the 6600GT.
Specifications
| 5700U | 5950 | 6600 | 6600GT | 6800 | 6800 GT | 6800 Ultra | |
| Architecture | NV3x | NV3x | NV4x | NV4x | NV4x | NV4x | NV4x |
| Manufacturing Process | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.11 | 0.11 | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.13 |
| Transistor Count | 82M | 130M | 146M | 146M | 220M | 220M | 220M |
| Pipelines | 4 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 16 |
| TMUs/Pipe | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Clockspeed | 475 | 450 | 300 | 500 | 325 | 350 | 400 |
| Fillrate (Megapixels) | 1900 | 1800 | 2400 | 4000 | 3900 | 5600 | 6400 |
| Memory Interface | 128-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Size | 128 | 256 | 128 | 128 | 128 | 256 | 256 |
| SLI-Capable | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Single texture fillrate for the 6600GT is more than double that of botht he 5700U and the 5950 - in fact the fillrate is greater than that of the regular 6800. As with most midrange cards however, memory banwidth is a bit constrained with a 128-bit interface unlike the high end cards which usually sports a 256-bit one. NVIDIA seems to have made a successful transition to the 110nm manufacturing process unlike their experiment gone awry with the NV3x family when moving to 130nm. The transistor count on the 6600GT is still pretty high - the X800 has a count of only 160M so I imagine that the 6600GT is relatively expensive to produce.