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XFX GeForce 6600 DDR-2 |
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Redefining the Budget Market |
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By Josh Walrath |
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The XFX 6600 DDR-2 XFX has a good reputation in terms of hardware quality, and they are now offering a pretty amazing warranty for their GeForce series of cards. Currently they offer a lifetime warranty on the card, and they carry over that warranty to a second owner if that card is sold in the future. The only hitch is that each owner needs to register with XFX. Not a hard thing to do, and well worth it for both the initial and secondary owner of the card.
It is hard to argue that XFX does not have a solid bundle for this budget card. For a budget card XFX includes a pretty hefty bundle. The card that is supposed to be shipping is a dual DVI card, but unfortunately the one I received was DVI and VGA. XFX will certainly not be shipping such a product labeled as such, and we can attribute this to this being a pre-release review card. The bundle includes 2 x DVI to VGA adapters, S-Video cable, the full DVD version of Far Cry, several manuals, and the drivers CD. For a product that looks to ship at $99, this is a very solid bundle. XFX packages this product in a very sturdy series of boxes. It is actually a bit ludicrous how many layers of packaging the user has to get through to be able to get to the card itself. While this is a bit of a waste, the card will be well protected in transit. The VGA output of the card is quite sharp and shows no degradation at 1600x1200 and above. The TV-out supports HDTV resolutions, but unfortunately XFX does not include the component out adapter that would enable this functionality. The build quality of the card is fairly good, but there is a small issue that might concern a few users. Typically graphics cards ship with polymer based capacitors as video cards tend to generate a lot of heat and GPU’s can pull a lot of power. By using polymer caps the lifetime of the card is extended over what would typically be seen with standard electrolytic caps. This card features all electrolytic caps. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, as the 6600 chip and the DDR-2 do not pull that much power as compared to high end cards, and it will not experience as much heat buildup as the cutting edge would. Still, it would have been nice to see all polymer caps, as this helps to ensure a long lifespan for the card. Polymer caps do carry a premium over electrolytic, and to hit the pricepoint that XFX and NVIDIA are aiming at, some corners had to be cut. Luckily the caps that XFX does use are of high quality and are not no-name generic caps.
With all the layers of packaging, this is one well protected product. Cooling on this card is handled by a small heatsink and fan combination. This is strictly a barebones cooler and it is not designed to handle high thermal loads. At stock speed this isn’t an issue as a 400 MHz 6600 still runs fairly cool. Once overclocking is applied then things change. Again, it would have been nice to have had a slightly more robust cooler on this product, especially as XFX is aiming this product at the budget enthusiast. The reference 6600 DDR-2 design features the core running at 350 MHz and the memory at 400 MHz (800 MHz DDR). XFX takes the liberty to clock the core to 400 MHz for this product, and guarantee’s it. The extra 50 MHz does help quite a bit, and it gets it that much closer to GT speeds. Overall XFX has done a good job getting a very solid product out to consumers. While any budget card will have its drawbacks, not everyone can afford a $300 and above video card. Many users will be quite happy with this $99 product sitting in their computer. Initial Impressions and Overclocking I wasn’t sure what quite to expect with this card, as it definitely is a budget product. Oftentimes budget products leave a user with a bad taste in their mouth as they do not always feel that they received exactly what they paid for. Sure, everyone would love to get a Porsche for the price of a Geo, but most of us live in the real world and we know what to expect for the money spent. In between the bundle and the quality of the card itself, I would be more than satisfied with this purchase. The overall performance of the product is quite good as well, and in pure numbers it would probably be slightly faster overall than a Radeon 9700 Pro. It would have a big edge though in the amount of memory it brings to the table (double that of the 9700 Pro). In many current games, the extra memory goes a long ways.
Note the electrolytic capacitors. It is a budget based card, and the design reflects that. To overclock the card I used NVIDIA’s CoolBits. I first tried the auto-overclocking setting to see where the clocks would land. I was a bit disappointed as it only reached 434 MHz core and 840 MHz DDR. I thought that this was far too conservative for what this core and memory should be able to do, and I was right. In the end the core hit 521 MHz and the memory ran at 910 MHz DDR. This enabled the core to hit higher than standard 6600 GT speeds, and almost reached BFG 6600 GT OC speeds. The memory would not budge above 910 MHz, and this is probably more of a factor of board design than what the memory can actually clock to. At the stock memory speed we get around 12.8 GB/sec, and when overclocked we reach around 14.56 GB/sec.
The back isn't terribly impressive, but it is there nonetheless. The core could actually hit above 521 MHz in many applications, but it was somewhat useless to go past that number. The main reason for this is that even though it would be clocked higher, no performance gains were seen due to the memory speed holding it back. Without the ability to clock the memory above 910 MHz, overclocking the core above 521 MHz and creating more heat and possibly decreasing the lifespan of the product seems fruitless.
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