GeForce 6600 GT - are you satisfied?

[godihatework]

i voted "It was fine after I tweaked it a bit."

my PNY would hard lock on me in any 3D app after about 15-20 minutes of playing until i removed the heatsinks and found that the "thermal pad" on the HSI bridge chip had actually melted to the point that it was completely surrounding the chip...it looked as if it had been candy-coated.

after i cleaned that mess up and replaced the thermal pad with some AS5 it has been working flawlessly at 550 core 1000 mem (i could go higher but the performance is good enough that i don't think i need to)

[SFL]

I bought a MSI NX6600GT-VTD128. The MSI software is a nightmare - don't install it. Just use the NVidia driver...

The card itself runs fine, the fan is not too loud, performance seems to be great, the card supports standby (S3). I was a little disappointed that I only get max ~50FPS in UT2004 Onslaught since this game uses the CPU heavily.

[agent]

Hello ;)

I got my MSI NX6800-TD128 128MB DVI/TV today and its running ;)

I installed Coolbits 2.0 and the overclocking settings show me 350/800 as standard clock and the card should only make 325/700 as standard.....So its overclocked at standard? Also i noticed when i run 3dmarks 2005 four times, the scores go down..
1 got 3514 and last 3467 points... Is this normal? Thank you and nice weekend.

http://www.msi-technology.de/produkte/graf_idx_view.php?Prod_id=408

Review
http://www.tcmagazine.info/articles.php?action=show&showarticle=103

c u

agent

[HENNESSY]

no problem, xfx agp rev3.

[amarios]

I've got a Aopen Aeolus 6600GT AGP and it has almost turned me insane! :mad: After A LOT of reinstalling win xp, testing drivers etc etc. I I tried a newer bios from XFX. Now it works just fine :cool: Even made a nice overclock with it. (core: 525MHz memory: 1100MHz) originally 450/900 :afro:

[Chazam]

I boughtt a PNY 6600 GT AGP and everythings been fine. No problems at all.
I'm very satisfied! :cool:


If only my Processor wasn't holding me back........ :thumbdwn:

[Hollow]

G-Force 6600GT PCI-express


I'm very angry, I have tested new drivers, tweaks, cooling, directX and looked through forum after forum for a solution, but all I see is other people just as frustrated as I am.. My PC freezes and even the almighty Ctrl-Alt-delete fails..

HL2 works fine, I was very pleased at first, until I wanted to play some Americas Army.. CS:s and all the other Steam games has no problem.

I am shocked and amazed what I have to go through to get a product I payed for to work. I payed for the damn thing and I will get it to work DAMN IT!!

[cuts]

i voted worked after i tweaked it :)
havent had a lock up in games for a couple of weeks , seems the route of my problems was having my card on same line as HDD's :thumbdwn:
since i put them on the same line as my dvd/dvdr i aint had no real problems :afro:

[KickAssCop]

Leadtek 6600GT AGP 8X running dandy here at 570/1.06 core/mem.

Sold 4 of these cards and they were dandy also. No problems at all. The only thing I am not satisfied with is the increase in performance (or decrease) from my old 9800 Pro @ 9800XT!

[Silvergun]

I bought the MSI VIVO one - worked out of the box, but I haven't tried the VIVO yet. I really, really, really like it.

[Laho]

Still working with lockups/reboots in HL2 Single player, have to try Forceware 7x.xx drivers. Great card (Leadtek 6600GT) in other use. Works like a charm in Americas Army under Fedora Core 3.

[void]

Yes.
I bought a MSI NX6600GT-VTD128. The MSI software is a nightmare - don't install it. Just use the NVidia driver...

Second that, fine with little bios hacking. Thou the provided DVD authoring and player SW are on safe side. Using nvidia reference drivers, temp hack bios.
Card works flawlessly even with 240W SiletX PSU in shuttle xpc.

[imnes]

ubuntu is using a relatively old kernel being debian based and all. if i were you id go for something a little more bleeding edge like gentoo or fedora to get a 6600gt running.

You can always upgrade to the testing release of Ubuntu. Currently it's on 2.6.10-4 and ships the 6629 nvidia driver.

Nick

[Rollo]

I have a set of eVGA 6600GT SLI, I've had no problems with them with the exception of a thermal throttling after well over an hour of very heated UT2004 deathmatch.

I'm amazed at the level of performance you can get <$200., if "4X8X" above 10X7 isn't your priority, a person could get along fine with one 6600GT easily.

A lot of bang for the buck alone, two in SLI is most impressive. The increase I've seen from SLIing them starts at about 30% and takes off from there.

[znxb22]

Bought an XFX 6600 GT 128MB AGP

Not Happy Jan!

Artifacts appear in the following games:
Far Cry
Thief 3 Deadly Shadows
Deer Hunter 2005
Settlers - Heritage of the King

Have tried all of the various drivers - nothing seems to improve nor fix these artifact display problems.

Temp is low 48Celcius
Power supply is 400W

Can ANYONE help?

Thanks in advance,
Nick Bala

[nism0racer]

hola! this is my first post since my ASUS N6600GT AGP is working great now. It drove me quite nuts but now since everything is ok im happy. BTW I voted under "worked after a bit of tweaking" but its really ALOT of tweaking.

First time i powered it up, I ran FEAR, Splinter Cell: PT and 3D Mark 05 with major artifact problems. I looked through numerous forums, worked with different drivers / tweaks and still had the problem. I finally got it to work by setting AGP to 4x and Fastwrites OFF. I also found out I had a crappy powersupply with only 10A on the 12v rail (on a 450W PSU, WTF?) so I purchased a new PSU with 20a on the rail, some extra ram and a pci slot fan (I was getting pretty obsessed to get this working at this point). With the new PSU I still couldnt get it to run on AGP 8x so I just said the hell with it the difference is minute anyway.

So by then I was happy it was working and got a little boost form the extra system ram. Then I bought Half life 2 with Counterstrike: source. Then I got even more happy since they worked really well and i could max out the resolution with decent settings. It also seemed that HL2's graphics seem alot nicer than FEAR (Maybe its just the artistic design of HL2). Then after an hour or so of gameplay the artifacts started to appear again! :( Well so I run Riva Tuner to monitor temps during gameplay and I found out i was hitting 90-100 degrees celsius after playing for a while with idle temps of 50-60 degrees. I guess my pci slot fan wasnt helping too much at all.

I'm pissed again so I pop open my case so I can at least play games while I wait for the Zalman VF700 CU that I just ordered. It comes 2 days later (thanks zipzoomfly.com!) and I was so excited that as soon as I woke up I started working on it right away (skipped breakfast!). Checked out the instructions-looks easy enough; checked out the forums-most people had great results with it and most had no installation problems (other than bending a few fins to get it to fit properly.

So I yank out my card and set up a nice anti-static work area. I removed the old GPU heat sink and fan and took a look at it. It looked pretty cheesy compared to the Zalman. It barely had much surface area for heat to dissipate. It only had a few horizontal fins and a crappy fan (Shouldve bought a different brand based on the type of cooling system). There was also another heat sink but it wasnt on a memory. It was weird because i never saw anything like this with other video cards. It looked kinda like a north bridge in a motherboard. I removed the heat sink also but found out that it didnt need to be removed so I put it back. I proceeded to install the support pins and brace. I then intstalled the ram heatsinks (4 of them) and then tried to position the gpu heatsink/fan and saw that some of the fins were preventing full contact. So I tried bending the fins while the heatsinks were on the ram and the sinks popped off (good thing there were 4 extra sinks). On some of the heat sinks, bending wasnt enough so I had to clip them off. I then placed the thermal grease and procceded to attach the fan/heatsink to the gpu. Perfect fit and perfect contact! I was happy.

Then I tried to reinstall the card. It was pretty huge in relation to other peripherals. The fan sticks upward about 3/4 of an inch above the card itself. The problem with that is that I have a desktop case and it doesnt have much "overhead room". There was no way for me to put that case back on. So I had this goofy idea to try to put the fan upside down so I could have room. So i took it out again flipped it upside down and tried to reinstall the card. Now the fan was sticking downward and now I cant even seat it correctly. Frustrated but still hopefull I put everything back as how its supposed to be (fan sticking up) and installed it. I turned it on just to see if I totally ruined my card but it started up well and I was getting Idle temps of 34 degrees! I was a little happy. So then I just decided to cut a hole in my case to fit the upper part of the fan and it worked out pretty well! My temps were pretty much the same as with my case open. MY load temps were 50-60 max! rarely hits 60! So now Im happy again and I overclocked to 580/1100 with barely noticable gain in temps.

Sorry bout this long post but I just had to vent out all my frustration.

[Kev1]

MSI 6600GT PCIe here. No problems since I got it early in 2005. Runs BF2, Q4, D3, NFSU, COD, UT2004 great! Will be keeping it till I upgrade sometime in March to 6800 GS, 7600GT, or 7800GT depending how funds, prices are :)

[RejZoR]

I have no complaints. I switched from Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB (overclocked) to GeForce 6600 GT 128MB (now also overclocked ;) ) and everything was within expectations. Performance is outstanding compared to R9600 Pro, also i have nothing to say against image quality. It's simply excellent. Last time i had NV card there was no Image Sharpening feature that i found to be very useful for Quake 4 to make metal elements even more metal like. Also no problems with cooling which covers GPU and all memory modules. Drivers installed without any problem and also i haven't found a single game that i play, to have any kind of problems or visual artefacts. Everything works as it should. I'm running it on AGP 8x bus on Gigabyte GA-7N400E-L motherboard (nForce2 chipset).

[a12ctic]

i have a e-6600GT pci-e, and i must say its a great card, linux loves this card and it loves to overclock...Plays mostly any game i have (including quake4) on all high settings 1024x768 (what rez i always use) Its great for 120$...

[NZedPred]

I voted for Still trying to work on my problems, although my problems are probably motherboard-related. I even posted on it here too http://nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=62515.

As per the post, looks like the first one I got was faulty, but the second one will only work in my older (and much slower) box. Main PC has an nForce 1 chipset, wondering if that is the problem so may actually buy a Via KT600-based motherboard.