X-bit labs

ASUS N6600 GT/TD Graphics Card Review (page 3)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 05/13/2005 | 09:23 AM ]

PCB Design

The ASUS N6600 GT/TD for the AGP platform looks as cute as the PCI Express version: the deep blue of the PCB goes well with the golden color of the cooler.

The cooling system is an exact copy of the one we described in our NVIDIA SLI review (for details see our article called NVIDIA Multi-GPU SLI Technology: New Approach to Old Ideas). Like on the Extreme N6600 GT, the fan is not highlighted, although it has transparent blades and looks as if having some highlighting. The cooler is mounted at an angle of 45 degrees, like on many other GeForce 6600 GT AGP cards. It is fastened with two spring-loaded clips which are not as tight as those on the Leadtek card, and the fastening is rather slack as a result. To avoid damaging the open die of the GPU we recommend you to be very careful during the installation of this graphics card into the system case. There is no protective frame on the heatsink or on the GPU case, so you must not take the card by the cooling system’s heatsink lest you chip the GPU die, killing the device altogether.

The design of the N6600 GT/TD makes the cooler partially cover the memory chips, so the latter have no real cooling at all. The HSI bridge is, on the contrary, cooled with a separate copper heatsink. Its efficiency is questionable, though. Unlike the one on the Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH, this heatsink is not blown at by the main cooler and becomes very hot at work. This defect is common among many GeForce 6600 GT cards equipped with coolers of that type.

This being not the Top Limited version of the product, the GPU is clocked at 500MHz and the memory at 450 (900) MHz. The accelerated version of the N6600 GT/TD works at 520/550 (1100) MHz and is equipped with 1.6ns memory. The memory chips on our sample were slower, having 2.0 nanoseconds access time. The manufacturer of the chips is Samsung, the company that makes memory for almost all present-day graphics cards.

On the whole, the design of the ASUS N6600 GT/TD fully repeats the reference design with one DVI-I and one D-Sub connector, with such minor deviations as the copper cooler and a different color of the PCB.

Noise, Overclocking and 2D Image Quality

The acoustic characteristics of the ASUS N6600 GT/TD are acceptable, yet its cooler is louder than the one installed on the Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT/TDH. Anyway, the noise remained always in a comfortable range and didn’t practically stand out against the noise from the power supply and the Thermaltake Venus 12 cooler.

We got as high as 580/530 (1060) MHz during our overclocking experiments. The GPU frequency gain is fairly big, while the memory frequency gain is expectably small due to the use of 2.0ns chips on an intricately wired PCB.

The quality of the 2D image outputted by the card was crystal-sharp in all resolutions up to our monitor’s maximum of 1800x1400@75Hz. Since the overwhelming majority of graphics cards today deliver an impeccable 2D quality we will touch upon this subject in our upcoming reviews only if there are really some problems with a graphics card’s 2D output.