6600 GT for AGP!

Rejoice! NVidia announced yesterday that the AGP versions of the price/performance busting 6600 GT GPU are now “widely available”. Which means the chips have been supplied to the various add-on card manufacturers and product should start hitting the retail shelves in the next week or two. Initial reviews of the PCI-Express version of the 6600 GT have been stellar:

“The GeForce 6600 GT is freaking awesome. For $199, it offers performance in league with cards that cost upwards of 300 bucks, and it positively crushes all current competition at anything below that price” - Scott Wasson, editor in chief of Tech Report

I’ve been waiting for this one for a little while, constantly getting more annoyed at the lack of a decent non-PCI-express mid-range card to replace my dieing 9600 Pro (the fan has been rattling for a while and is now stopped - fine at idle but it overheats and freezes during gaming). The CAN$400+ 128MB NVidia 6800, or perhaps a CAN$375 256MB ATI 9800 Pro have been tempting.. but just out of reach budget wise. My guess is that the 6600 GT will do very, very well. Performance will likely be a tad lower than the native PCI-e version due to slightly slower memory (and the PCI-e to AGP HSI bridge must add overhead), but overall the loss ought to be negligable. So for the massive chunk of the market currently on DX8 and budget DX9 cards, the performance boost will be massive and timely: The one-two punch of Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 offers the software incentive and sets the bar for what we’ll need for the next couple years of games. But it’s the pricing, at CAN$250 (maybe $200 by Christmas), that ought to be the deal clincher.

I’ll be eagerly watching NCIX.com for their arrival.