If it looks like NVIDIA has been releasing a lot of graphics cards lately, it's because they have. While the monster 512MB 7800 GTX and the impressive 6800 GS have been getting a lot of time in the spot-light, the GeForce 6600 DDR2 which was quietly released last month has enjoyed an equally successful launch.

Launched with much less fan-fare than we normally expect from NVIDIA, the 6600 DDR2 is a replacement for the vanilla 6600 DDR1. Reference 6600 DDR2 cards come equipped with a 350MHz core clock, a 50MHz improvement over the 300MHz 6600 DDR1, and 400MHz memory, a significant 125MHz improvement over the 275MHz memory found on the 6600 DDR1. The reference 6600 DDR2 also sports 256MB of memory instead of the 128MB spec'ed for the reference 6600 DDR1 cards.

While the DDR2 variant is a nice replacement for the vanilla 6600 DDR1 card, the real reason behind the launch of the 6600 DDR2 is to go toe-to-toe with ATI's new Radeon X1300 Pro.

As you've probably guessed by now, in this review I'll be checking out a 6600 DDR2 from XFX. The XFX 6600 DDR2 is even a better value over the reference 6600 DDR2. With an MSRP of just $99 it is not only cheaper than the $119 reference 660 DDR2, it also sports a faster core clock that has been bumped up to 400MHz at the factory.

	GeForce 6600 GT	GeForce 6600 DDR2	GeForce 6600	GeForce 6600 LE
Core Clock (MHz)	500	350	300	300
Memory Clock (MHz)	500	400	275	275
Memory Data Rate (MHz)	1000	800	550	550
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory Type	GDDR3	DDR2	DDR	DDR
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec.)	16.0	12.8	8.8	8.8
Texel Fill rate (Gtexels/sec.)	4	2.8	2.4	1.2
Vertices/sec. (million)	375	262.5	225	225
Pixels Pipes	8	8	8	4
Vertex Engines	3	3	3	3
RAMDACs (MHz)	400	400	400	400