Friday Reviews

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Looks are of course secondary to performance but here the Ultra doesn't fail you. The Ultra PC4000 is quite capable of delivering in the area's it is needed, be it raw numbers or overclocking potential. Like most PC4000, to get the really high clocks from it, you will need to up the voltage to 2.9v but the ram hasn't flinched running at this (default is 2.7v) voltage once in the week or so I've been using it.

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The Soltek SL-915GPro-FGR is a rather unique motherboard, not only does it come with 4 DDR1 memory banks but includes a BIOS level automagic overclocking utility called SAT (Smart Acceleration Technology) that actually works.

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Low Latency DDR2 memory modules have been popping up recently, capable of 3-2-2-x timings, and utilizing the recent yields of the Micron DDR2 die. A while back, we had a look at the Wintec Industries' modules, which were capable of DDR2-706 @ 3-2-2-8 timings (DDR2-720 @ 3-2-2-4 has been achieved since). How will these Corsair modules compare?

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nVIDIA was the first to enter the 'mainstream' PCI Express video market with the GeForce 6600 class GPU. ATi followed suit a few days later with its Radeon X700. While the companies are different, the technology behind the competing VPUs is actually quite similar. Built on IBM's 0.11 micron manufacturing process, the nVidia GeForce 6600 has eight pixel rendering pipelines and the 'GT' model has a core clock speed of 500 MHz. ATi uses TSMC's 0.11 micron manufacturing process, and its graphics core has eight pixel rendering pipelines too. The higher-end Radeon X700 XT VPU is clocked slightly slower than nVidia's solution, at 475 MHz. Over the next dozen pages, PCStats will try to answer that question as we test out a videocard made by Gigabyte called the GV-NX66T128D. This PCI Express x16 videocard is based on nVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT GPU, and packs in a svelte 128MB of Samsung GDDR3 memory.

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This article will focus mostly on the performance of SLI enabled setups versus single video card solutions. I use an X800 XT as a base to look at when thinking about price to performance. A single GeForce 6600 GT is about $200 making a pair $400. The retail price of the X800 XT I will be using is almost $700. Think about the price to performance ratios when looking at the benchmarks.

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Apollo? Yes you're probably wondering the same as we are. Who are they? Well it so happens that Joytech, which owns the right to the Apollo section of video cards, are the same people that came out with the "Bloody Monster" lineup of video cards not to long ago. From what I found in some review archives on other sites they were excellent overclockers. the Apollo namesake seems just about right for this line up of 6600 series cards, and although the new PCI-E interface is somewhat hard to understand, given that AGP has been around for so long, the clocks on the PCI-E versions are actually higher. The 6600GT looks really good on paper, and from what we've witnessed so far in its performance, it looks like an excellent mid-range video card that is more than capable of holding its own with newer games.

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A little while ago nVidia launched their GeForce 6600GT graphics card using the PCI Express interface. The GPU received great reviews around the web for impressive performance for the price but lacked one major thing - AGP support for those who had not yet made the jump to the new platform. nVidia has now released the AGP version of their 6600GT graphics card and today we take a close look at the product and see how it differs from the PCI Express version.