It would have been good if your test would have included the ATI Radeon X800. The X800 is sold with the, Dell, Intel, Pentium 4, computers ?

Question: Can you included the X800 in your next test ?

Absolutely incredibly detailed and thorough article. With your theory article, I'm left virtually with no unanswered questions. I'm assuming your power consumption measuring device doesn't work with a PCI Express card. I'd love to hear the wattage of it. It sounds as if it shouldn't have a problem going fanless.

Why couldn't your AGP system use a 865 board with a S478 Prescott? It would of been a slightly more accurate comparison. Or one of those boards with an LGA775 socket and a 865.

Overall, great article. I would of prefered to see 6800 vs 6800 GT Tests... and also, tests against the other video cards in the $200 and under price range. ~ The FX5900 NU (128MB) and the 9800 Pro 128.

And I wish RTCW: Enemy Territory was tested, its one of my favorite OpenGL games..

Lol im just whining, great work guys.

Nice review guys.

GF6600 is a very interesting product, outperforming its HW specs in many cases as it's less than half a 6800GT. The fact it has only 4 ROPs is masked partly by it's 128-bit memory bus & the fact that games will likely be more shader bound in future. A great $/performance trade-off! I can't help but think of "Rampage" ideas. ;) I suspect HSI/AGP versions will sell like hotcakes when released.

This is completely rubbish however:

"We want to mark specifically the pioneering character of NVIDIA’s release. The GeForce 6600 family chips are in fact the first mainstream graphics processors intended for the PCI Express platform. Until now, this market niche was practically empty: versions of the GeForce FX with the HIS bridge couldn’t boast a high level of performance, while the RADEON X300 and X600 were nothing more but a reincarnation of the RADEON 9600, which was no speedy racer, either."

Ati "X" series are specifically designed for PCIE & were the first PCIE native platforms. By your own argument, as the NV43 is a cut-down derivative of the NV40 which is AGP interface, and is also nothing more than a reincarnation...