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The Card

The GeForce 6 series is a bad mutha in DOOM 3 and NVIDIA has chosen to include a DOOM 3 decal on top of the heatsink/fan unit for the 6600GT AGP. Superficial details aside, there are numerous differences between the 6600GT PCIe and the 6600GT AGP. The first thing to note is the SLI connector is now gone. As with all other AGP versions of the GeForce 6 family, there is no support for SLI on the AGP bus. The lower available voltage of the AGP slot requires the inclusion of a molex connector to help power the card.

The provided reference sample is still using 2.0ns Samsung GDDR3, the same kind that is found on the 6600GT PCIe reference card that we have along with the X700 Pro. Note the angled orientation of the memory - this is more akin to the GeForce 6800 series AGP card layout. In contrast, the memory on the PCIe version was parallel to the edges of the board.

LCD owners will be thrilled with the inclusion of Dual DVI slots on the AGP 6600GT - hopefully manufacturers will follow the reference design for those who have sworn off analog connections.

The Philips SAA7115 TV Encoder found on the back of the PCIe 6600GT is also missing. One of the big touted features of the 6600 series was the TV encode ability, more specifically, the ability to reduce the noise in television video capture. Hopefully this is not a limitation of the AGP bus but merely skipped over on the reference sample.

There is also an extra chip on the 6600GT that we have not yet seen on any other NVIDIA AGP board; the HSI chip. During the introduction of PCIe in the early days, NVIDIA and ATI took divergent routes - ATI decided it would build native chips for both PCIe and AGP while NVIDIA chose to do a single chip implementation for both and allow it to work on both bus types with the High Speed Interconnect (HSI) chip. NVIDIA got quite a bit of heat for it during that time but it looks like they have vindicated themselves as they are the first to the AGP market with the 6600GT.