Introduction

For as long as games continue to offer yet more eye candy and require ever more efficient graphics cards will they continue to appear. We are of course referencing graphics cards as they together with processors are about the fastest evolving components in personal computers. Someday not so distant from now the industry is bound to enter some kind of crisis of where to evolve next, the reality of computer graphics today is immensely impressive, especially if to look back at how far things have progressed over so little time. A vast array of the latest games put all this graphics horsepower to great use, DOOM III, FarCry, Half-Life 2 and many more, who would of thought things would improve so much from the sprites so commonly in use during the 1980's and early 1990's? Anyone thinking we are going to discuss PC gaming in this article would be forgiven, in fact our interest concerns Nvidia's latest mainstream native PCI Express chipset, namely the Geforce 6600GT. In order to review its strengths and weaknesses we evaluate a product from Galaxy, their own 6600GT graphics card.

First impressions and box contents

The first thing anyone is bound to notice is the box, with its metallic blue and clear writing there is no confusion of what's inside, should this not be the case an explanation in no less than seven languages is apparent on the rear of the box. Inside except the card we find two CD's (drivers + PowerDVD 5.0), a user manual, a DVI to HD-15 converter, and S-Video cable. The card itself includes in addition to the standard fan also copper heat sinks on all 128MB of its 2ns DDR3 memory. Given that the latter is a low power thus low heat type of memory these are more to increase looks than serve as a heat extractor. The card is of normal length hence should not cause problems intruding into the DIMM sockets on various motherboards and size wise is an ideal candidate to anyone's SFF PC. The build quality is upon inspection best described as very good while the standard included warranty is 2 RTB (Return To Base). As some may have already noticed Galaxy sadly refrains from including any games as sometimes available elsewhere.

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