Chaintech SA6600G Video Card Review - In the Box
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So Chaintech provides a large amount of goodies in their box. I normally only bother with OEM cards but those are proving difficult to find these days, and some of the goodies provided in retail packages are actually useful now. In this case, the mini DIN to S-Video cable is nothing special, nor is the DVI to VGA adapter, but the mini DIN to HDTV Component is more of what I want to see included. When you consider the HDTV Component Encoder in the GPU, this begins to look like a particularly good Home Theatre PC solution.
By putting as much as possible in hardware as opposed to making the software (thus, the CPU) have to work away composing the HD stream, you can put a less powerful (and quieter) processor in the box. nVidia also provides support to get the DVI-out to operate with many HDTVs, which have that as an input option. Not all of them do, so it was nice of Chaintech to provide the more universal component out as well. Looking at the software pack, it's the usual array of game demos (useless), one full game (haven't tried yet, but having a full game is better than a demo), Photoshop Album (somewhat useful, if you don't have Photoshop already), and WinDVD, which seems to be included in every bundle for every product I review these days. I'm wondering when they are going to start including it with processors.
The card itself though, is what you are paying for here. As mentioned already, it makes use of the nVidia NV43 (6600GT) GPU, and 128MB of memory. Between the two is a 128bit connection, compared to the 256bit ones found on top level cards. This is a limiting factor on bandwidth when you start to enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at higher resolutions. There isn't a huge issue with the 6600GT though, since it's not fast enough to make use of those features when you turn north of 1024x768 in newer games.
NV43 is essentially a half version of the higher spec'd NV40, making use of half the pipes (8 pixel and 3 vertex), half the memory bus, but all of the other features such as UltraShadow II, version 3 of pixel and vertex shaders, and the video processing engine that makes use of nVidia's Purevideo feature set for those looking to make use of this in a home theatre environment as opposed to a gaming one. We'll have to take a look at how that ends up affecting playback of various video files.
One of the nice features that I was happy to see was the inclusion of a Dual Link DVI port, as opposed to a garden variety combo of VGA and normal DVI. Why Dual Link? If you ever plan to run one of these gigantic LCDs from Apple for example, a dual link DVI connection is necessary to take advantage of all the available resolution. This of course, is exactly what I plan to do in the future (if not from Apple, then some other 23-30" wide screen LCD). The normal DVI cable doesn't possess the bandwidth to carry the signal for that many pixels. I haven't seen this feature on anything else but workstation class cards, or the high end 6800GTs and Ultras. It was nice of Chaintech to bring this feature down to the mainstream. *Edit: It appears that Chaintech has removed this feature from this card. It now only supports single link DVI, so those looking to purchase a reasonably priced card to drive large LCDs, look elsewhere. For a monitor such as the upcoming Dell 2405 this card might still be useful due to the HD Component dongle, but I don't know how high of quality that would end up being. It is a possibility though. Removing of Dual Link DVI makes this card no longer truly stand out from its competition.*
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