Verdict: AN AGP geforce 6600 GT? It must be Christmas
Benetton likes to run 'socially stimulating' adverts. In other words, the company isn't afraid of getting on people's nerves. One particularly memorable past billboard campaign featured a 5ft-high photo of three human hearts. The first heart was captioned 'black', the second 'white,' and the third 'yellow.'
You can see what it was getting at: some distinctions are baseless, and ideas of superiority often have no inner foundation. PCI-E is a good example of this. We're currently being inundated with hardware manufacturers telling us just how good PCI-E is.
However, what these companies actually mean is how good it could be. Sure, in the future, the higher bandwidth PCI-E offers over AGP will be great, and the parallel architecture that allows devices to communicate over the bus without having to wait for one another is interesting. Yet there's currently no appreciable performance difference between PCI-E and AGP, so it seemed unfair that such an excellent mid-range GPU as Nvidia's GeForce 6600 GT was going to be PCI-E only.
Fortunately, Nvidia is no longer discriminating against AGP systems. The company has developed an AGP GeForce 6600 GT, and Leadtek's WinFast A6600 GT TDH is the first commercially available graphics card we've seen. It uses exactly the same GPU as the PCI-E models, although these have slightly faster GDDR3 memory - 500MHz (1GHz effective) compared to the 450MHz (900MHz effective) of AGP versions.
The AGP card also has a bridge chip to allow the PCI-E native GPU to communicate over the AGP bus. Neither of these changes seems to make a great deal of difference to the card's performance, though.
However, due to the limitations of the AGP architecture there are two distinct disadvantages to the AGP 6600 GT. Firstly, it lacks SLI support and secondly, it requires extra power from a Molex connector, as AGP slots don't provide as much juice as 16x PCI-E slots.
There are also some cosmetic differences between the PCI-E and AGP cards, as the bridge chip in the AGP version has its own heatsink, separate to the GPU's HSF. To help keep the bridge chip cool, Leadtek has cleverly designed its GPU HSF to blow air over it as well as over the memory.
Leadtek's HSF design is also very refined, and is only slightly noisier than the HIS Radeon X700 Pro (see p53), which uses an Arctic Cooling HSF. The Leadtek's performance however, is far better than the HIS, averaging 43.9fps in Far Cry at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF, compared to the 35.8fps of the HIS. Bear in mind, however, that the HIS is a PCI-E card, so it was benchmarked using a slightly different system. Our AGP test rig includes a 3.2GHz Pentium 4c with 1GB of PC4000 DDR (at 400MHz), while the PCI-E rig uses a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 EE with 1GB of PC5400 DDR2. Considering the Leadtek was tested on a slower PC, its score of 43.9fps with AA and AF enabled is all the more impressive and well over what's required for smooth gameplay. To get these kind of frame rates from a £150 graphics card is pretty special.
Surprisingly, in the normally ATi-friendly Tomb Raider benchmark, the Leadtek was still faster than the HIS, churning out an impressive 33fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF, compared to the HIS card's 26.8fps. The Leadtek's scores in the Nvidia-friendly Doom 3 benchmark were much more predicable, though, scoring a silky smooth 42.2fps at the same settings, compared to the paltry 28.9fps of the HIS.
Considering the Leadtek beats the HIS despite being tested on a slower PC, it's clear that the GeForce 6660 GT is the fastest mid-range GPU around. In fact, Leadtek's AGP version is even quicker than XFX's PCI-E GeForce 6600 GT (see Issue 14, p43) - at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF, the Leadtek beat the XFX in two out of the three tests. In XFX's defence, the Leadtek was tested with a newer version of the ForceWare driver and it also benefited from the recent 1.3 patch for Far Cry. This adds Shader Model 3 support, improving performance and image quality for DirectX 9c GPUs, such as the GeForce 6600 GT and 6800 GT.
We still weren't completely satisfied, though, so we decided to give the Leadtek a tougher workout by overclocking it. We managed to push the core clock speed from 500MHz to 560MHz, and the memory from 450MHz to 506MHz (1,012MHz effective). However, while this sounds like a decent overclock, it only boosted the score in Far Cry at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF by 2fps to a barely playable 21.4fps.
CONCLUSION
The GeForce 6600 GT is the best mid-range GPU available and Leadtek's Winfast A6600GT TDH finally allows owners of AGP PCs (which, let's face it, is most of us) in on the act.
Leadtek's card is cheaper than the PCI-E 256MB HIS, far quicker than the 128MB GeCube (see p54) and comes with a decent bundle too, including Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.
Leadtek's well thought-out cooling system is also much better than the reference design, as it allows a good overclock and is pretty quiet. But, most importantly, the Leadtek is capable of running all the latest games at high detail settings.
