X-bit labs

ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer: Extremely Silent, Extremely Hot (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 10/19/2005 | 10:40 AM ]

Project: Snowblind

The workload laid on the memory subsystem in Project: Snowblind is not very heavy, either: even enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering do not affect the testing participants’ performance - ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer and NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT perform equally fast here. Since the game uses a lot of pixel shaders 2.0, overclocking of our ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer appears very efficient: it provides the good 20% performance advantage over the reference GeForce 6600 in pure speed mode. In eye candy mode the positive effect of overclocking reduces with the growth of the gaming resolution, so that by 1600x1200 there is hardly any left despite the increase of the memory bus frequency by 100 (200) MHz. It looks like this game prefers high fillrates and the 4 ROP of the NV43 appear a definite limitation here. The results of RADEON X1600 XT are another indirect proof to this point: this guy is in even worse situation, because it features only 4 TMUs for its 12 pixel processors. Therefore, in 1600x1200 it rolls down to the last but one position in front of RADEON X700 PRO.