Asus Extreme N6600GT - Page 01

Last week we examined ATi's X700 pro card, targeted towards the mainstream market. It's now time to take a look at what rival Nvidia has to offer in the way of the 6600GT chipset.

In the following table you will find a sum up of the major differences between the various versions of Nvidia Geforce 6 based cards:

As you can see, the Extreme N6600GT differs from other 6600GT based cards, with slightly increased clock speeds and of course, slightly increased price.

- Packaging - Bundle

The Extreme N6600GT's packaging isn't anything surprising. The box is arrayed with the card's main features such as 128MB of DDR3, the 3-year warranty and the PCI-Express requirement.

Inside the box you'll find a standard D-sub cable, DVI adaptor and VGA connector, a portable CD case labeled Asus CD Suite. Inside the CD Suite you'll find the card's software bundle which is listed below:

Software Bundle:
- Joint Operations : Typhoon rising
- AsusDVD
- Asus PowerDirector 3DE
- Medi@Show SE 2.0
- Asus CD manual
- Asus VGA driver CD

02 - A closer look

The 6600GT chipset is the first Nvidia chipset fabricated using the 0.11 micron process. ATi showed the way, starting with its X300 chipset and now it seems 0.11 micron will be the standard for all upcoming graphics cards.

The front side of the card (click to enlarge).

The Extreme N6600GT from Asus features 128MB of GDDR3 but with the drawback of a 128-bit memory bus. A wider memory bus would result in faster transactions between the NV43 and the memory modules but the really high default clock speeds make up for it.

A view at the back side of the card (click to enlarge).

Both memory and core clocks run by default at 515MHz. That creates an effective 1030MHz for the memory! And all that for only $200.

A picture from a different angle.

The card is cooled by a transparent plastic fan maintaining airflow across a copper heatsink. The memory chips are located on the front and are all covered by heatsinks as well.

On the upper edge of the PCB, as you might have spotted from the picture above, there is an SLI edge connector. As long as you have an SLI bridge connector and two identical NV43 cards, you can combine them for increased performance as shown below:

For more information on SLI, stay tuned for our next review.

The D-Sub, DVI and VGA connectors.

One last thing to note about the N6600GT PCI-E from Asus, is that it doesn't require any power connector plugged on the PCB in order to work properly. The PCI-Express bus is able to provide the card with up to 75V, something the AGP bus could not do.

Test System - Page 03

3DMark05 - Page 04

With 3DMark05, Futuremark continues the tradition in its benchmarking software by providing a state-of-the-art Microsoft ® DirectX ® 9 3D performance benchmark.
3DMark05 is an all new 3DMark version, making the most out of Microsoft's DirectX 9. The previous version, 3DMark03, provided a nice testbench for this technology. However, 3DMark03 used DirectX 9 specific features in a limited manner, because fully supporting hardware was rare at the time of its launch. In contrast, 3DMark05 requires DirectX 9 hardware with full support for at least Shader Model 2, and takes shader usage to never before seen levels.
Just like its predecessors, 3DMark05's point system is set so that at the moment of release, the high-end VGA cards available on the market can only score around 5000 3DMarks, whereas the worst card that meets the program's requirements, yields a score of 1000.

Game Test 1 - Return to Proxycon

Being the sequel to the "Battle of Proxycon" from 3DMark03, in "Return to Proxycon" we're once again set in space and the battle continues as space pirates invade a cargo ship in order to take control of its valuable cargo.

This test, tries to simulate a futuristic first-person shooter game with all the high details that such a game entails. The dynamic shadows, highly detailed environment and advanced lighting techniques, ensure that under normal circumstances, no recent card can run it with decent frame rates.

On the first test, the performance difference between the x700 and 6600GT is just 1fps.

Game Test 2 - Firefly Forest

A forest is filled with magic fireflies at night. The moon is nearly full, illuminating the forest with a bluish faint light. The magic fireflies have flickering, bright green lights that playfully move around the forest.

This scene is a nice example of a smaller scale outdoor scene with rich vegetation. Immediate visibility is only short range, and there is a skybox surrounding the whole scene.

A large number of trees with their branches swinging separately, and dense vegetation being dynamically distributed according to the camera movements, make this test the most demanding of the three.

Once again the 6600GT shows more power, rendering this scene from 3DMark05 and outperforming the X700pro by an average of 1.4fps.

Game Test 3 - Canyon Flight

A Jules Verne type airship flies through a canyon guarded by a dangerous sea monster. The airmen defend their ship using heavy cannons, but these seem to have no effect on the huge sea monster. Finally, the crew manages a narrow escape using the airship's "last resort" afterburners.

This scene is fairly complex with large areas of water reflecting the high canyon walls. The water is actually one of the key points of interest in this scene. The water not only does realistic looking reflections and refractions, it has a depth fog, making the sea monster swimming under the airship appear deep down in the water. The air in this scene also uses a volumetric fog, making distant cliffs in the canyon appear far away.

The third and final test from 3dmark05 produced similar results to the previous two.

Final Score

 3DMarks on 3DMark05 are now calculated with the following formula:

(Game Test 1 * Game Test 2 * Game Test 3)^0.33 * 250

This is basically the geometric mean of the total frames in each game multiplied by 250, which means that all game tests are on an equal par.
Let's see the results for the X700 Pro IceQ:

The Asus Extreme 6600GT made a great first impression and yielded the most 3DMarks in our first benchmark.

This test also uses post-processing effects, such as Depth of Field and Bloom effects which are widely used in today's game cut scene sequences.

07 - Half life 2

Half life 2 is no doubt the most anticipated pc game of all times. Gamers keeping the excellence of Half Life 1 in their mind as well as the remarkable E3 demo preview, have been anxiously waiting for the much delayed release of HL2.

Regarding the storyline, the player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people he cares about are counting on him.

Characters - Advanced facial animation system delivers the most sophisticated in-game characters ever seen. With 40 distinct facial "muscles," human characters convey the full array of human emotion, and respond to the player with fluidity and intelligence.

Physics - From pebbles to water to 2-ton trucks respond as expected, as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy.

Graphics - Source's shader-based renderer, like the one used at Pixar to create movies such as Toy Story® and Monster's, Inc.®, creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game.

AI - Neither friends nor enemies charge blindly into the fray. They can assess threats, navigate tricky terrain, and fashion weapons from whatever is at hand.

To measure performance we used the Video Stress Test (VST) that is available in the CounterStrike:Source beta available through Steam. We set all the details to the highest level and changed the resolutions from 800x600 to 1600x1200.

Half life 2 was at first believed to be an ATi optimized game and that Nvidia cards would face difficulties running it under DX9. The 6600GT is here to prove this wrong.

The Asus Extreme N6600GT is capable of successfully handling the Source engine even with all quality options enabled, at up to 1280x1024.

08 - Doom 3

A massive demonic invasion has overwhelmed the Union Aerospace Corporations? (UAC) Mars Research Facility leaving only chaos and horror in its wake. As one of the few survivors, you struggle with shock and fear as you fight your way to Hell and back, in an epic clash against pure evil.

Activision made it's miracle again with Doom 3 which is said to be the best-looking game ever, thanks to the brand-new OpenGL graphics engine used to generate its convincingly lifelike, densely atmospheric, and surprisingly expansive environments. If you are a fan of the previous Doom games then you will get many flashbacks with this revision, since you will find reimagined versions of almost every monster from both Doom and Doom II.

To measure performance on the game we used the timedemo demo1 command from the console (Alt+Ctrl+~).
Enabling the high quality setting and executing the timedemo demo1 command twice for each resolution, we witnessed the following:

First without the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings enabled, we had the following results:

Most ATi cards have difficulties rendering Doom 3. Nvidia was always aware of this and advertised the 6600GT as the perfect card for that particular game. We're really happy to find out that it wasn't just another management trick. The 6600GT is indeed an excellent card for Doom3. Nothing could hold it back and we were encouraged to increase the quality settings.

With AA set to 4x and AF to 8x, the 6600GT offers approximately twice the performance of the X700 pro. Even at 1280x1024 it yields an average fps above 25.

10 - Medal of Honour Pacific Assault

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault puts you in the boots of a WWII soldier in the Pacific Theater of Operations. As Marine Private Tommy Conlin, you must survive the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor and then join the Allied crusade to defeat imperial Japan's bloody conquest of the Pacific. From the attack at Pearl Harbor to the pivotal battle against Japanese Forces at Tarawa Island, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault gives PC gamers a sense of the courage it took to endure and overcome the Japanese threat in WWII and fight for VICTORY in the Pacific.

To record performance of this game we used fraps and played around for a minute in the first stage of the demo.

Medal of Honour brings the worst out of the 6600GT. It starts out with approximately the same number of frames per second as the HIS X700 but suddenly the performance of the 6600GT drops below X700.

12 - Colin McRae 05

For all you racing fans out there, this test is for you and will represent the Racing game category in our benchmarks.

From the graphics point of view the first thing you'll notice in the game, is the excellent amount of detail on your racing car. High resolution textures on the car and lighting make it quite impressive. All the eye candy, such as the sun reflection in the virtual camera are still the same as the older CM versions but motion blur has been added when your car hits something hard which will happen most often if you're new to the racing simulation world.

To measure performance on the game, we used fraps to get the average fps of the whole 8th stage of UK which is actually the only stage you get to play on the demo.

In this game, the Asus Extreme N6600GT seems to be less affected by higher resolution settings. Even though the X700 can produce more fps under 800x600 and 1024x768, it falls behind the Nvidia card's performance.

Running the game with quality settings, the results change once again and the 6600GT's edge of running better under high resolutions is lost. The HIS X700 pro offers more acceptable framerates and generally greater overall performance in this game.