6600 GT review

the nvidia 6600 gt in currently the most popular graphic card among gamers because of its price-to-performanec ratio, it offers great performance at a very reasonable price.
i am reviewing is a MSI 128 MB version, there is hardly any difference in the performance of the 128 and the 256 mb versions, so buying thre latter is not recommended.
first the package, MSI has inc;uded lots of stuff here, there are about 13 software and games cd including fulll versions of pop=sands of time,XIII and myst 4, and full version software from adobe,farstone and windvd are also included, there's also a hdtv/s-video cable to hook up ur pc to ur tv which is a great experience compared to gaming on a 15/17"monitor.
now the specs, the 6600 gt is based on the NV40 having 90nm fabrication, it has a default clock speed of 500 mhz,it has GDDR3 128 bit memory of 128 MB, which is clocked at 1 GHz, there's also a tv out port.
now to the benchmarkig, i ran the tests on a pc with intel pentium 4 3ghz cpu(530J) with HT,intel 915GAV motherboard with 800MHz FSB, seagate ultraATA 7.2K HDD,1 GB RAM at 333MHz.
at default settings the card gave a respectable score of 3306 in 3DMarks'05 and 1500 in 3DMarks06.
now to the real world tests, in DOOM3 at 4XAA AND 4XAF and 1204x769 the card gave a very playable 60 FPS,in half life 2 the card delivered 70 FPS at 6xAF with a res. of 1204x768, in quake 4 at 1204x768 with 2xAF and 4XAA the card delivered about 35-40 FPS, similar results in age of empires 3 and call of duty 2 with the highest settings, and now for the "system killer" FEAR the card spewed out only about 15-20 FPS at high settings.
so as you can see, the card allows you to nearly all games without a hitch, even at high settings.
the card is very overclockable too, provided you have sufficient cooling, herein lies the problem, the gpu of the 6600gt heats up very quickly it runs at 75-80 C under load, but once you take care opf the cooling using fan cards or thermal paste, this card overclocks like a dream, MSI also bundles its own overclocking too-DOT dynamic overclocking technology which can safely give you a performance boost, i recommend the optimal settings to be 750/1300 MHZ for the core and memory respectively.
to conclude the 6600 gt is an excellemt card for its price, its totally paisa-vasool maal, even with the coming of 7600 gt which is priced at 13000 rs., this is still the best mid range when it comes for value for money.
glossary-
AA-anti aliasing
AF-Antistropic filtering
FPS-frames per second
(the higher the better)