While we have already taken a look or two at NVIDIA's current mainstream offering, the GeForce 6600, in the past, today we've got a completely new take on this card with Albatron's PC6600U Trinity Series. While the basic technology behind the PC6600U remains largely the same as past cards, the core clock and memory speeds have been raised substantially, and the cooling system utilized on the PC6600U is completely different from what has been used in the past. Albatron's new cooling apparatus is designed to cope with this card's higher than normal clock speeds, while keeping temperatures in check. It does this by quickly removing heat from the front of the card using heatpipes, and then releasing it upwards using a fan/heatsink attached on the rear. It seems like Albatron has latched onto some innovative ideas here. But how will it work in the real-world, when installed in the chassis of an every-day gamer? Press on and find out...
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| Specifications & Features of the Albatron PC6600U |
| Albatron does a second take on the GeForce 6600 |
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CINEFX 3.0 SHADING ARCHITECTURE
- Vertex Shaders
Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
Displacement mapping
Geometry Instancing
Infinite length vertex programs*
- Pixel Shaders
Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
Full pixel branching support
Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
Infinite length pixel programs*
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
64-BIT TEXTURE FILTERING AND BLENDING
- Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
- Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
- Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
- Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions
INTELLISAMPLE 3.0 TECHNOLOGY
- Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering
- Blistering-fast anti-aliasing and compression performance
- New rotated-grid anti-aliasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
- Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
- Fast z-clear
- High-resolution compression technology (HCT) increases performance at higher resolutions through advances in compression technology
ULTRASHADOW II TECHNOLOGY
- Enhances the performance of bleeding-edge games, like id Software's Doom III, that feature complex scenes with multiple light sources and objects.
- 2nd generation technology delivers more than 4x the processing power over the previous generation.
ADVANCED ENGINEERING
- Designed for PCI-Express
- 128 MB DDR
- 128-bit advanced memory interface
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs
- 0.11 micron process technology
- Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring
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ADVANCED VIDEO AND DISPLAY FUNCTIONALITY
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- MPEG video encode and decode
- WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
- High-quality video scaling and filtering
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz.
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
NVIDIA DIGITAL VIBRANCE CONTROL (DVC) 3.0
- DVC color controls
- DVC image sharpening controls
OPERATING SYSTEMS
API SUPPORT
- Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0
- Full OpenGL, including OpenGL 1.5
* The operating system or APIs can impose limits, but the hardware does not limit shader program length.
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Albatron Trinity Series PC6600U
NVIDIA GeForce 6600
GPU Core Clock: 400 MHz
Memory Clock: 350 MHz (700 MHz effective)
Fillrate: 3200 Mpixels/s
Memory Bandwidth: 11.2 GB/s |
THE BUNDLE:
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Albatron included a somewhat standard bundle of software and accessories with the PC6600U. Of course we've got the obligatory setup manual and driver CD, as these are the bare essentials. On the software side of things, we also found a gamepack CD with some demo software, a WinDVD Creator CD, and Arx Fatalis, a DirectX 8 based RPG that received some decent reviews, albeit from a couple years ago. It's always a good idea to throw in a game with a video card, but not one that is dated as such that really doesn't show off the strengths of the DX9 based GeForce 6600. The only cable we found was a singular S-Video to Component Video adapter, which may or may not be useful for everyone. Overall, we found the bundle to be a bit sub-par when compared to competing products. This is an area that Albatron will need to improve upon if they want to compete more favorably with other manufacturers.
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