Introduction

With the introduction of PCI express (PCIe) a lot of high end graphic cards entered the market. Cards valued at least over 500 euro. Now that the rush for such a new platform has dropped to a lower level, VGA card manufacturers started to bring out more and more budget minded cards.

While I was looking at the online shops for a new card for my brand new nForce 4 based AMD 939 setup, my eye spotted the Gigabyte 6600 256 Mb Turbo Force. All big names such as Nvidia 6600, 256 Mb, Turbo Force. Marketing talk I thought. So why not buy it and make a review of it?

Comtech was so kind to borrow us two other VGA cards. The Asus 6600GT and the Asus X800XT. This way I had some cards in my possession with a different price range. To give you an idea, at the time of writing these were the average pricings:

6600 = low end = $100

6600GT = mid end = $170-200

X800XT = high end = $450-500

This data will be the red line through this article.



You can see that a 6600GT based VGA card costs ~1.7 times more. And the X800XT will empty your wallet even 4.5 times more. But is the performance increase similar? That's the question I asked myself while writing this short review.

Just a few different tests should be enough to show the trend in this analysis.



Let's start by presenting today’s contestants.

NVIDIA 6600 Chipset



Gigabyte 6600 specifications

It costs a tad more then the average 6600 based card, because it has more (and faster) memory, but also a higher clocked core. Hence the Turbo Force part in the name. The Gigabyte comes with a fancy passive cooled heat-pipe heatsink, whisper quiet.



Click for bigger picture ...

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NVIDIA 6600 GT Chipset



Asus 6600 GT specifications

The 6600 GT was and still is a very popular solution for the mid end market. Priced attractively and delivering decent power, it has found its place in many computers. And with the capability of SLI, you can increase performance enormously if you have the right motherboard.


Click for bigger picture ...

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ATI X800XT Chipset



Asus X800XT specifications

The last card in today's test session is based on ATI's X800XT chip. Until recently (before the X850 series) it was top of the bill in ATI's camp. So we have high expectations. Also considered the price it should deliver some amazing results. I hope...



Click for bigger picture ...


Let’s compare their specifications:

	Asus EN6600GT/TOP/TD/128M	Asus EAX800XT 2DT/P/256	Gigabyte GV-NX66256DP
Chipset	Nvidia 6600 GT	Ati X800 XT	Nvidia 6600
Memory	128 Mb DDR3	256 Mb DDR3	256 Mb DDR
Memory Clock	1000 Mhz	1000 Mhz	500 Mhz
Core Clock	500 Mhz	500 Mhz	450 Mhz
Buswidth	128 Bit	256 Bit	128 Bit
Pixel Pipes	8	16	8

Test setup & Methodology :

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ "Venice"
Mainboard	Asus A8N SLI
Memory	2*512 Mb DDR600 Adata
VGA	Asus 6600 GT 128Mb Asus X800XT 256 Mb Gigabyte 6600 256 Mb

The CPU was running at ~2.6 Ghz (9*290 Mhz, with the memory in 1:1 (synchronous)) I had some power under the hood. I installed windows two times; once for the NVIDIA based VGA cards, and once for the ATI card.

The installed software was:

Windows XP Professional

Service pack 2

Direct X 9.0c

nForce4 NVIDIA Drivers, version 6.66

ATI Catalyst Drivers, version 5.8 / NVIDIA VGA drivers, version 77.77

The applications I used to test were:

3D mark 05

3D mark 03

3D mark 01 Se Pro

UT 2004

Call Of Duty

If it was possible, I ran tests in both 1024*768 and 1280*1024 resolution. This was made easy thanks to a very handy tool: benchemall.

We have a mix of games and syntehectic tests for you, let’s start with the first one, 3D Mark 2005.

3D mark 2005





The first charts and I have almost a hit. The 6600 GT performs ~1,5 times as fast as the vanilla 6600. This is very close to the price difference. The X800XT doest the job "only" 2,5 times as fast.

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3D mark 2003





In this case the 6600 GT is also 1.5 times faster. The X800XT shows its power in higher resolutions where it's 2,2 times as fast. When using a 1024*768 resolution, it's almost exactly double the performance.

And finally the oldest version of 3DMark that is still supported by Futuremark

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3D mark 2001 Se



You can directly see that it's a rather old benchmark. Almost none of the newer rendering technologies is used, this causes the performance differences to be only factor 1,3 and 1,6.

Time for the games ->

UT 2004


Unreal Tournament 2004 Botmatch. (Result in Frames Per Second)




When using a lower resolution, the 6600 GT and X800XT are faster than the 6600, but only by factor 1,2. When cranking up the resolution, the 6600GT takes an advantage of 1,4 and the X800XT of 1.6. Still both are not even close to the price difference. There the multiplier was 1.7 and 4.5 ...

Maybe just some bad luck ? Let's try another game.

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Call Of Duty


Call Of Duty Demo. (Result in Frames Per Second)




Well, the numbers speak somehow for themselves. No spectacular differences here either.. except on the highest tested resolution, the 6600 GT is about 1,7 times faster. Just as we hoped

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Final thoughts

The fact that I only used default settings on these cards certainly has had its influence on the results. No AA or AF or other A-whatever settings were used. Why not ? For most of the people it's hard enough to install the drivers. So they probably won't play with these setting.
The higher the price, the better they think. Right? In this article we can see that the price / performance ratio isn't linear. Of course you all knew this, Madshrimps has very smart readers ;), but instead of wasting my time on gaming, I made this article.

When using all the advanced settings it might me interesting to buy a higher end VGA card. The X800XT based cards, for example, will deliver all the eye candy fluently.

But for "out of the box users", an average / mid end card will do the just fine!

/piotke out



I’d like to thank all the cool guys from Comtech for borrowing us the video cards for this test!


Questions/Comments: forum thread