Noise, Overclocking, 2D Quality

Mainstream graphics cards from Leadtek had already got our praises for their very quiet operation and we had expected the SLI kit to be quiet enough, too. And we were not mistaken: the two PX6600 GT TDH cards were not much louder than the single card and their noise wasn’t annoying at all against the noise from the rest of the system components. So, if you care about your hearing, this kit should please you.

Using the new version of the ForceWare driver we managed to overclock the kit without third-party utilities. The results were not much of a success, though. We only got a 45MHz GPU frequency gain and a 10 (20DDR) MHz memory frequency gain. In other words, the Leadtek WinFast PX6600 GT SLI was stable at 545/510 (1020DDR) MHz frequencies. Our trying to overclock the kit more resulted in various image artifacts in games. So, this can hardly be called successful overclocking, especially since some samples of the GeForce 6600 GT can speed up to 600/550 (1100) MHz, but we deal with a SLI kit here and this fact may have brought some limitations.

The quality of the 2D image was very high, quite typically for a modern graphics solution. Installed into the master PCI Express x16 slot, both cards produced an excellent-quality picture in all display modes, up to our Dell P1110’s maximum of 1800x1440@75Hz.

So, the Leadtek WinFast PX6600 GT SLI kit is easy to install and quiet in operation. The only thing we now want to find out about this kit is if the speed of this solution can match the speed of such single top-end cards as RADEON X850 XT and GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Testbed and Methods

We tested Leadtek’s SLI kit on the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ processor (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
• ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard
• 2x512MB OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (CL2.5-3-2-8)
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 audio card

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 5.4
• NVIDIA ForceWare 71.89

Besides the WinFast PX6600 GT TDH cards from the Leadtek kit, we also tested the following graphics cards:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256 MB (400/1100MHz)
  for details see our article called Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH Graphics Card Review
• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB (350/1000MHz)
• ATI RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition 256MB (540/1180MHz)
  for details see our article called ATI RADEON X850 Platinum Edition: Good Things Go Better
• ATI RADEON X850 XT 256MB (520/1080MHz)
  for details see our article called PowerColor X850 XT and PowerColor X800XL Graphics Cards Review
• ATI RADEON X800 XL 256 MB (400/980MHz)
  for details see our article called ATI's 0.11 Micron Chip on the Run: ATI RADEON X800 XL Review

Following our traditional methodology, we enabled the ForceWare optimizations, except the Anisotropic mip filter optimization. The Image settings slider was set to the Quality position. In ATI’s Catalyst we enabled Catalyst A.I. using the Standard mode. The Mipmap Detail Level option was set to Quality.

If possible, we control FSAA and anisotropic filtering from the application. Otherwise, we force the necessary mode from the driver. We don’t edit any configuration files. The graphics quality settings in the games were set to the maximum level, the same for graphics cards from NVIDIA and ATI Technologies. The following games and applications were used:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Doom 3
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Far Cry
• Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell
• Half-Life 2

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat
• Colin McRae Rally 2005

Strategies:

• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War
• Perimeter

Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks

• Aquamark3
• Final Fantasy

Synthetic Benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark03, build 360
• Futuremark 3DMark05, build 120