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Review: MSI NX6600-VTD128E Diamond

by David Ross on 6 February 2005, 00:00

Tags: MSI NX6600-VTD128E Diamond, MSI, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa5v

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Overclocking

When it comes to overclocking this board, one has to wonder - Is it closer to a GeForce 6600 or 6600GT in its characteristics? The product name seems more befitting of a 'vanilla' 6600, but the higher core and RAM clocks suggest we may have a card that is closer to a GT variant. Of course, what really matters in these things is simply the numbers - How well does our NX6600-VTD128E Diamond overclock? The answer - Incredibly well. Of course, this is just one sample, and may not be representative of all boards of this type, but hopefully it will give us some idea of what can be achieved.

Core clocks first - From the default 400MHz core, we bumped speeds up... And up... And up.. And up some more, until we finally hit a stability ceiling at... Wait for it - 524MHz, an overclock of almost 125MHz. Surely the RAM won't reach so high though? Wrong. Again, from 400MHz, we found ourselves all the way up at 525MHz, still running stably, another 125MHz overclock (or 250MHz if we're talking effective clock speed). It doesn't take a genius to point out that this takes the board beyond the levels of a stock GeForce 6600GT, so let's see what it means for performance.

We'll start with Doom 3, running at 1280x1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF, to avoid video memory limitations.

Doom 3 OC

Overclocking here gives us an extra eleven frames per second, and as expected takes us beyond the performance laid down by the 6600GT. Fantastic stuff!

Secondly, we gave our overclocked card a tilt at running our Half-Life 2 timedemo, this time at 1024x768 with 4x AA and 8x AF.

Half-Life 2 OC

The numbers are even more impressive here, as the NX6600 jumps from last place to first thanks to its extra clock speed, an overall improvement of around 17 frames per second! I really don't need to say any more than this, the numbers speak for themselves.