Comments on: PC upgrades - a 6600 GT AGP

By: mark

mark — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:48:37 +0000

I don’t play CS so I can’t really offer any suggestions. One thing is that the SOURCE engine in general consumes a lot of CPU… I have a 7600GT now and while I’m largely still GPU-bound in most current games, in Half-Life 2 I’m totally CPU bound (2.8GHz P4). The graphics card is relatively unworked.

So maybe you’re hitting a CPU bottleneck?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:40:31 +0000

Hey guys,

I am pleased to hear that the 6600GT is working absolutely fine for you, I also purchased 6600GT AGP 128MB card and I was impressed with the vast improvement it had over my previous ATi card, it played all the battlefield games fine, star wars and far cry games perfectly when cranked right up, however, when it came to playing counter strike: source in OFFLINE mode I was absolutely devastated as it suffered the same lag problems as it did before, I tried to turn down the settings in the game, but still failed. I have been trying to fix this problem for some time and I don’t know what the problem is. Please offer me some suggestions on what to do, as I know other people who have the same graphics card as me have no problems with offline mode.

Thanks.

Ohterwise the 6600GT for me was a good buy for the power it produces.

By: John

John — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:01:06 +0000

Hi guys, iv got a Gainward Gforce 6600gt AGP 256MB

With the stock cooler the vga is idling @ 52-56 degress celcius and when on load, it even reached an 80 degrees maximum which is too much. Any help on hos to solve the problem? Searched about the zalman VF700 but onj there site they said that if the heatsink coveres the whole vga it cant be done.
thx

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 22:00:32 +0000

Hmmm Will… where do I go to set the speed to ‘Dynamic’? I dl’ed it but do not see any options that relate to the Fan Speed… I might be blind but yeah…

By: mark

mark — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 19:11:26 +0000

If you do want to replace the stock fan, Will D, I can 100% recommend the Zalman VF700. I used it in my new Shuttle, and it’s amazing compared to the stock cooler.

http://www.vmunix.com/mark/blog/archives/2005/10/14/shuttle-sd31p-notes/

Note that it does take up a lot of space, as much as any “double slot” card. But it’s quiet running at 5V, and cools much better than stock.

By: Will D

Will D — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 17:57:35 +0000

I came across this web page searching for a way to remove the stock fan on the same video card. I appreciate finding the gainward drivers. My ears can rest from the unrelenting assault of a squealing fan.

By: mark

mark — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 14:51:52 +0000

Thanks for the tip Will!

By: Will B

Will B — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 07:59:14 +0000

I have the same card (XFX 6600GT DDR3) and like you I noticed that the fan was a tad noisy! However Gainward release an application called ExperTool (http://www.gainward.de/drivers/) if you install this and set the fan speed to ‘dynamic’ it takes the fan speed down to about 50% which is considerably less noisy. Even though the application is developed by Gainward because NVidia cards are mostly the same it will work on XFX and other brand cards. Gainward we love you.