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.