Verdict: Extremely cliched, but damn good nonetheless

Leadtek is another company that has started down the road of pre-overclocking its graphics cards in order to give it an edge over its competitors' cards. Unfortunately, Leadtek hasn't been particularly inventive about doing this, as the PCB is still a standard-looking green affair. The company has also tagged on an 'Extreme' label to the name of the card - that's, like, so passe.

If we have one pet hate here at CPC, it's anything containing the word 'extreme'. It's quite possibly the most overused - and sometimes misused - word in the computer industry. In fact, why not just throw it in a box along with 'ultra' and 'ultimate' and 'X', and get rid of these words once and for all.

However, in this case Leadtek does have a legitimate reason for adding the Extreme label. This card runs enhanced settings of 550MHz for the GPU and 560MHz (1.12GHz effective) for the memory, which is considerably faster than the standard settings of 500MHz (1GHz effective). Although the Gainward has quicker memory, Leadtek runs the GPU faster, which means, in most cases, the Leadtek has slightly better performance. However, the difference was an imperceptible 0.1fps. Also to the company's credit is that, despite the overclocked settings, the Leadtek-designed HSF is very quiet, considerably more so than the reference Nvidia design.

Like the other 6600 GT cards in this Labs test, it beats all the X700 Pro cards in almost every benchmark. Only the 12-pipeline X800 can outpace it in some tests.

With a little bit of extra tweaking, our card was happy to run at 570MHz for the GPU and 600MHz (1.2GHz effective) for the memory, although this didn't increase the performance in Far Cry at all.

Unlike the Gainward card, there's no ViVo support, only a TV output. The games bundle, however, is considerably better, and includes Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Both are pretty good games that will make use of the GPU's 3D power.

As the Leadtek and Gainward cards perform similarly, the major deciding factor comes down to price. But as there's only £10 in it, and the Gainward has better features, it just edges it. But either card would be a good upgrade for your PC.

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