New PC, Geforce 6600

davidnsibs · Dec 17, 2006, 10:32 AM

Hi Everyone,

I recently bought a lot of new bits to build a new PC (old one is in sig, so its quite an upgrade!). I now have (the main bits):

Core2Duo 6600, Asus P5B Deluxe, 2GB of PC2-6400 of cheap(ish) RAM, 580W Hiper Modular PSU, Hitachi deskstar 160gb SATA-II, and an XFX Geforce 6600 (non-GT).

I got the geforce used from ebay as I needed a pci-express card and I want to wait till next year when ATI's dx10 stuff is out until I drop £250 or so on a new card. Obviously its just a stop-gap, but I'm a little dissappointed that (for instance) my 3Dmark03 score has actually dropped from the old PC, it was around 3300 marks and is now just below 3000. Anyone else got a vanilla 6600 gpu and have some comparisons (theres not much out there but I've seen some reviews with cards performing better than mine with a much less powerful cpu), or any suggestions. FEAR is running about the same with the same settings too.

Cheers for any ideas/info

EDIT: Its a 256mb card, and I'm running the latest chipset/bios/graphics drivers

fobis · Dec 17, 2006, 06:31 PM

I remember my old 6600 256MB AGP got pretty low benchmarking scores. If I remember right, the score for 3DMark05 was less than 2000.
Anyways, what driver version are you running?

davidnsibs · Dec 17, 2006, 06:59 PM

I just got the latest forceware ones, 93.71, but I think I've found the reason - my memory is only 64bit (compared to most 6600s which are 128, as was my 9500pro) so that's the main thing holding me back. Nice to know that theres notsome driver/ BIOS thing I didn't set up right or something. Now I just need to wait for the dx10 parts to come out so I can replace it

josh2thad · Dec 17, 2006, 07:33 PM

x850xtpe are nice if your willing to spend 100 bucks to tide you over

CDsDontBurn · Dec 17, 2006, 11:04 PM

what brand card is that 6600? but AFAIK, the 6600s are all 128bit. if you got a 64bit card, you probably got jipped on your eBay sale there.

fobis · Dec 18, 2006, 12:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CDsDontBurn

what brand card is that 6600? but AFAIK, the 6600s are all 128bit. if you got a 64bit card, you probably got jipped on your eBay sale there.

Nah, there were the few 6600's with a 64-bit memory bus.
Look here: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/287

CDsDontBurn · Dec 18, 2006, 12:31 AM

wow, never knew there were 64bit versions

.

davidnsibs · Dec 18, 2006, 05:01 AM

Umm, its branded (on the box/card label) XFX Geforce 6600 256MB DDR, and Rivatuner tells me that its:

Graphics core : NV43 revision A4 (8pp,3vp)
Memory bus : 64-bit
Memory type : DDR (RAM configuration 07)
Memory amount : 262144KB
Core clock : 300.857MHz
Memory clock : 199.125MHz (398.250MHz effective)
Reference clock : 27.000MHz

I'm fairly sure its fine and the ebay site just said XFX 6600, so it could have been anything, and I didn't pay much for it so I'm not worried. Nice thing its that it is completely passive and low profile, so when I do upgrade I've got a nice little card for a multimedia PC :-) Tell you what though, this PC is awesome, I do a lot of work using mathematical software and some of the equation manipulations I was doing were taking 10 seconds or so, and when you are doing say 50 at a time it begins to annoy you - now each one is nearly instant - awesome :-)