Product Listing

MSI NX6600 Ares (GeForce 6600 DDR2 256MB, PCIe)

By Vincent Chang - 17 Mar 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

For the NX6600 Ares, we prepared a test system based on the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. Coupled with an Athlon 64 3500+ processor and 1GB of Corsair DDR400 memory in dual channel mode, we had the foundations for a decently powered system. Windows XP Professional was then installed onto a Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive and quickly updated to Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0c.

We compared the MSI NX6600 Ares with the reference NVIDIA card and the other retail GeForce 6600 DDR2 card that we had reviewed previously, the XFX GeForce 6600 DDR2 256MB. While the reference card and the MSI card should be identically clocked at 350MHz for the core and 800MHz DDR for the memory, the XFX is slightly overclocked, with the core running at 400MHz instead. Hence, it is likely to have a slight advantage. Also, we have included some results of the MSI NX6600 Ares running in SLI, so that you can get an idea of how useful a lower-end SLI configuration like dual GeForce 6600 cards would fare. All the cards were tested using ForceWare 77.72. The following benchmarks were tested:

  • Futuremark 3DMark03 Pro (version 360)
  • Futuremark 3DMark05 Pro (version 120)
  • Unreal Tournament 2004
  • Halo: Combat Evolved
  • Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (version 1.1)
  • Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory (version 1.3)
  • Quake 4
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