SUMMARY: Today we are taking a look at a Gigabyte graphics card for the still present and active AGP graphics card market. We're looking at an AGP version of the popular nVidia GeForce 6600GT core. Read on as we take a closer look at the graphics card and how Gigabyte went about turning this PCI-Express chipset into an AGP edition and as well as the performance differences between both cards.
The nVidia 6600GT GPU core has been the biggest success story for nVidia in quite some time. The GeForce 6 family has become a breath of fresh air for a company struggling to keep its biggest competitor, ATI, off their back.
When ATI released the Radeon 9xxx, GeForce FX certainly took a nose dive in performance and sales, especially due to the overheating cores and vacuum sounding coolers that were needed in order to keep the card cool. GeForce 6 made a huge power boost for the nVidia team, though there has been some controversy with its 6800 family and the broken support for Purevideo, but we wont get into that today - we are here to talk about the most popular core, the 6600GT.
6600GT was introduced to the market as the first PCI-Express native solution for the mid-range graphics card market, and hasnt it grown from there. Designed on the latest 0.11um process with support for SLI, it has become the video card of choice. Designed to work with PCI-E from the start, nVidia used its HSI bridge in order to convert the PCI-E signals the core uses into AGP signals that various AGP enabled motherboards still use. This has now made the 6600GT a possibility on AGP enabled systems.
Today we take a look at Gigabytes retail offering of the 6600GT AGP edition and compare it to the reference video card to see just what (if any) speed advantages have come since the introduction of the reference card and then compare it to the PCI-Express edition.
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