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 |