X-bit labs

Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH Graphics Card Review (page 22)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 05/10/2005 | 11:26 AM ]

Conclusion

The Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH graphics card left us just as highly pleased as its PCI Express incarnation, the WinFast PX6600 GT TDH, did earlier (for details see our article called Leadtek WinFast PX6600 GT TDH Graphics Card Review). We do like its compact yet efficient cooling system as well as its rich accessories. We also have no complaints about the build quality and the quality of the 2D image as outputted by the card. So here’s another practically blameless product from Leadtek for you.

The performance is up to the mark, too. The card proved itself capable of challenging the RADEON 9800 XT in many games. The latter feels more confident in FSAA+AF modes thanks to having two times more memory accessed across a 256-bit bus. This is a not very frequent situation, however, and hardly matters for real gaming.

So, the Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH is fast enough to play modern games without full-screen anti-aliasing. When you enable this option, the narrowness of the card’s memory bus becomes an annoying bottleneck. But the good news is that the card, like all modern devices on NVIDIA’s chips for that matter, delivers a high performance in games that use the OpenGL API where some modern shooters and many flight sims belong. So, if you like such games as Doom 3 and IL-2 Sturmovik but don’t want to spend a small fortune for a GeForce 6800 Ultra, then the Leadtek WinFast A6600 GT TDH might be an optimal choice for you.

As for the future perspectives, we’re now waiting for the new generation of ATI RADEON X800 cards with the Rialto bridge and the AGP connector to arrive. It means the GeForce 6600 GT AGP is likely to meet a dangerous rival soon. Having a comparable price, the RADEON X800 features much more impressive technical characteristics.

Highs:

• Modern architecture
• High performance in modern games
• Efficient cooling system
• Quiet operation
• Low heat dissipation level
• Shader Model 3.0
• Floating-point color representation
• Second-generation PureVideo processor

Lows:

• No evident drawbacks