X-bit labs

ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer: Extremely Silent, Extremely Hot (page 26)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

The scenes in Game 2 test are less overwhelming than those of the first one so the texturing workload here is lower. As a result, ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer outperforms GeForce 6600 GT by just a tiny value, if outperforms at all, and this value can be actually regarded as a measuring error. Overclocking doesn’t help our hero to catch up with RADEON X1600 XCT even in eye candy mode, which is quite logical: the geometrical workload is quite heavy and the new ATI solution features only 5 vertex processors working at 590MHz speed. Of course, the driver issues prevent it from revealing its full potential, but it is still fast enough not to let ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer take the leadership here.

The situation in Game 3 test is quite curious. As the resolution growsб the efficiency of ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer overclocking reduces, so that in 1600x1200 it gets even below 10%. It is quite strange keeping in mind a pretty significant memory frequency increase and high texturing workload. We also see the about 10% advantage of the twice as much onboard graphics memory here for the first time. The situation is almost the same in eye candy mode, although overclocking turns 20% more efficient here. ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer competes quite successfully with RADEON X 1600 XT throughout all the tests in eye candy mode with enabled FSAA 4x and AF 16x, just like in Game 1 test.

All in all, the total score result we saw in the beginning is pretty logical. Just like in 3DMark03, ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer outperforms the reference GeForce 6600 GT equipped with 128MB of graphics memory only in a few rare cases, such as high resolutions and really heavy performance modes with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering. As for the overclocking efficiency, it didn’t help ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer to catch up with ATI RADEON X1600 XT in any of the pure speed tests from the 3DMark05 suite. In eye candy mode, however, this task turned out not that impossible to complete.