PC upgrades - a 6600 GT AGP

Look what Santa dropped off early!

I got pretty lucky last week and walked into NCIX as a new shipment of XFX 6600 GT AGP graphics cards arrived. They sold me one for the “bundle price” of CAN$265 since I was also buying a few other Christmas gifts. Considering that XFX is first to market with this card and demand is so high that they’re sold out everywhere, $265 was a better price than I was expecting. While I was there I also picked up the infamous Chaintech AV-710 soundcard I’ve previously mentioned. You can see the XFX card in the foreground — the AV-710 is tucked in behind it. Both cards fit into my SFF (Small Form Factor) Soltek Qbic 3401M without any hassles.

The first thing I noticed is that my 6600 GT is using a non-reference-design heatsink. It’s pretty beefy, with a big slab of copper underneath the polished aluminum fins. Without hearing Nvidia’s reference cooling setup as comparison point, I can’t tell you whether XFX’s change is for better or worse. But it’s definitely not “quiet”. At least, not compared to my ATI Radeon 9600, which was already by far the noisiest component in my Qbic. It is certainly not, however, a blowdryer. Most of the noise is of “rushing air”, not the higher pitched irregular sound that the 9600 Pro’s fan made. So in some regards, the fan noise on this XFX is easier to tune out as white noise. Once disapointment with the XFX is that the fan speed does not appear to be user-controllable. I know that some of the 6800 cards out there (like Leadtek’s) let you control the fan speed. This one doesn’t, AFAIK. Which brings me to my next point.

Temperature is pretty much what you’d expect for a 146M transistor GPU these days — clocked at 300Mhz in 2D mode the temperature is steady at 57C. At 500Mhz and pumping 3D pixel shaders out its ass, temps seem to hover in the mid 70s. I’d be curious to try the card out in a full-sized case to see if it ran any cooler. I doubt it would. The Qbic does a decent job exchanging air in the case, and the great news is that even with this increased source of heat, the Qbic is still able to keep the temperature right down at 36C at the lower (47%) fan speed during normal use. Just like it did with the 9600 in there. Excellent. Like before, during a game both the CPU and case fan crank up to 100%.

Overall, it’s a tad more fan noise than I was hoping for. If I could change one thing it would be a variable speed fan system to drop the decibals while in 2D “email mode”. Perhaps I’ll pursue an aftermarket option at some point. Or perhaps the ability to control the fan is embedded deep down in the driver somewhere and future tweak software like RivaTuner will let me at it.

Requisite screenshot:

There’s not much to say about performance. It’s stellar. My tests benchmark it right where it ought to be (see my previous 6600 GT post for links to benchmarks) for an Intel 865-based DDR system like mine with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4. As always skip the drivers that come on the CD and go straight to nvidia.com. With the 6600 GT being such a new card, and with Half-Life 2 being such a new engine, I’ve had the best performance running the latest beta series drivers — 71.20 right now.. Download them from Guru3d.com. All said and done, I’m running Half-Life 2 with all the goodies turned on at 1280×1024 and it’s smooth and gorgeous. Not a bad upgrade, since the 9600 Pro was struggling at 800×600, and HL2 is considered to be “ATI friendly”. I can hardly wait to try Doom 3!