Introduction

In case you have been living a normal life, where you mistake anti-aliasing as some advanced form of air defense system, where CrossFire only makes your eyes go cross eyed, and your only inkling of technology is that you can recognize an iPod, then you may or may not be interested to know that ATI has finally launched its long awaited next generation graphics card, the X1000 series.

While all the cards in the series were available for the media for reviewing, together with all the marketing blitz like a launch party, the actual situation in the retail channel is not as bubbly, with the high-end X1800 XT and the middle range X1600 XT only available next month. Even on ATI's own online store, there are no new generation cards. Meanwhile, the X1800 XT may seem to have the edge over NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX in certain benchmarks, but then it does have twice as much memory and the price and availability is still a major concern.

In our own preview of the Radeon X1300 PRO which is the lower-end of the new series, we showed that its performance was good enough to beat the GeForce 6600 but not the best selling GeForce 6600 GT. With the latter selling at prices equal to the recommended launch price of the Radeon X1300 PRO, this could pose a problem for ATI. Of course, the price of the new Radeons may fall but at the moment, both the price and availability of these new cards are not positive enough to recommend getting one, if you can get one that is. So what does that leave us with? Well, there is still the now venerable GeForce 6600 GT, which looks as good as when it was first introduced more than a year back. The prices have fallen steadily from its former upper mid-range respectability to the current lower mid-range rung. Like many matured graphics card products, the vendors have had time to fiddle and add their own refinements to the standard design.

As usual, the packaging from ASUS is not exactly modest in size.

ASUS has done the same for this version of the GeForce 6600 GT. The Extreme N6600GT Silencer 256MB features a passively cooled heat pipe system that is completely silent. This is not a new concept but ASUS has suggested a new solution with a radically different heatsink design. With its weird radiator protruding out, it looks more like a cheap prop from some sci-fi television show. How does this unusual design compare to existing GeForce 6600 GT cards? Read on to find out if its performance goes deeper than its eccentric exterior.