First Look

Like nearly all products from ASUS to have ever entered our test labs, the N6600 GT/TD came to us in its full retail rig. This graphics card is manufactured in two versions: ordinary and Top Limited Edition, the latter having higher clock rates. The design of the box copies what we saw with the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition, but the box itself is smaller.

We opened it up to find the following:

• ASUS N6600 GT/TD graphics card
• Brief Installation Guide
• DVI-I-to-D-Sub adapter
• S-Video cable
• CD with drivers and software from ASUS
• CD with CyberLink MediaShow SE 2.0
• CD with Joint Operations

We had got the ordinary version of the card, while the Top Limited version is also accompanied with a copy of the game XPand Rally. The accessories are not actually lavish. For example, if you happen to own a TV-set with an S-Video input, you’ll have to buy an appropriate adapter separately. There is also no Molex power splitter among the accessories which is usually enclosed with graphics cards that demand additional power. Well, it is possible that we dealt with a presale version of the product and the off-the-shelf version will be quipped with both an S-Video-to-RCA adapter and a power splitter. This presale supposition is also indirectly confirmed by the lack of cardboard compartments and of the traditional orange box with CDs that you usually see in the packages of ASUS products.

The software CD contains a full version of the user manual as well as ASUS’ drivers for GameFace Live technology. The point of this technology is in using web-cams and microphones when you are playing a game, so you can communicate with other players easily. More expensive graphics cards from ASUS come with a special web-camera with an inbuilt microphone, but the owners of mainstream solutions have to buy these devices separately to enjoy GameFace Live. This is hardly a drawback, though: the camera from ASUS can’t boast a high image quality and the inbuilt microphone isn’t sensitive enough, in our opinion.