After recently pitching the Radeon X700XT against the GeForce 6600 GT, it has become apparent that these two graphics cards are among the best value products ever created. The GeForce 6600 GT in particular is an impressive development featuring many new and exciting technologies. Not only is the GeForce 6600 GT a cut down version of the much more expensive GeForce 6800 series, but it incorporates a new technology called SLi. While I have been unable to test the SLi abilities of the GeForce 6600 GT as yet, it has been proven to boost the performance of the GeForce 6600 GT to that of the GeForce 6800 Ultra in some cases.

Of course there are a few catches to using SLi and as I have said before, it will not be for everyone. In order to use SLi mode two GeForce 6600 GT graphics cards are required, along with a motherboard that supports SLi with dual PCI Express 16x slots. There has been a great deal of controversy over SLi and many argue that its a useless technology that we do not need. There are also those that naturally disagree with this and I would have to be one of them. If SLi enhanced graphics cards cost a lot more and did not provide viable performance boosts then I would have to say do away with the technology.

However as proven, this is not the case and the GeForce 6600 GT SLi cards cost no more than the Radeon X700XT graphics cards. Furthermore if the user does have the right motherboard and does wish to make use of the SLi function, then they will receive healthy performance gains from the technology. Therefore, my attitude is this SLi exists on the GeForce 6600 GT at NO added cost and it is entirely up to the user whether they wish to utilize it or not. Now that I have finished my little SLi rant we can move on and look at Albatrons GeForce 6600 GT graphics card.

The GeForce 6600 series is still built on the NV43 GPU using the 0.11-micron process. It has all the basic core features of the NV40. Furthermore the 6600 series supports all the latest GeForce features found on the high-end 6800 graphics cards. The pixel pipelines have been halved from 16 of the GeForce 6800 cards, to 8 for the 6600 series. However even with 8, the GeForce 6600 easily out muscles the GeForce PCX series with double the pixel pipelines.

As mentioned earlier, the clock frequencies have also been wound down, reducing the cards memory bandwidth. However, GeForce 6600 does utilize GDDR3 on a 128-bit memory bus in either 128 or 256MB configurations. The GeForce 6600 series comes in two flavors; the standard GeForce 6600 and then the GeForce 6600 GT. The GeForce 6600 will feature a 300MHz core and a 550MHz DDR memory frequency. It has also been said that the manufacturer can configure the memory as they please for the standard GeForce 6600. The GeForce 6600 GT is more high-end and features a core clock of 500MHz and a memory clock of 1GHz.