Chaintech SA6600G Video Card Review - Conclusion
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So you're stuck with an AGP based motherboard for the immediate future, but you want to increase the ability of your system to present games as they were meant to be seen by the developers? What's a poor guy or gal to do? At the moment, there really are only two options for GPUs, the 9800Pro or a 6600GT. Just to make it more difficult, for the most part the two have nearly identical retail prices.
My vote would be to get a 6600GT based card, simply because it houses newer features than the older 9800 from ATi, and is not hurting in the game playing department either. Once that part is figured out, how do you pick which one of the many manufacturers for the card?
Well, since performance should be the same across all cards at stock speed, we're down to price and features. What does the Chaintech version of this card offer?
- Dual Link DVI port for large LCD screens *no longer available*
- HDTV Component Out, and HDTV encoder on board to reduce CPU load
- Quiet, unassuming heatsink to help retain your sanity
- 2ns GDDR3, which is faster than necessary for the 450MHz stock memory clock. Makes for easy access to the PCIe spec speeds (and beyond)
And on the negative side of the ledger:
- Heatsink does not sit well on the GPU, and doesn't do anything other than trap heat for memory
- No temp monitoring enabled in BIOS
- Not the cheapest AGP 6600GT model
For myself, this is a fantastic card. I fully plan to put this card in my HTPC and plug it right into our new HDTV. The fact that it doesn't have the greatest heatsink as far as cooling is concerned isn't a big deal for what I'm doing; overclocking a card within the miniature confines of an SFF probably isn't the best idea to begin with. And when I somehow scrape together (note to self: rob bank) enough funds for a 23-30" Apple Cinema Display I'll get another Chaintech SA6600G to drive it. *not any more, as this feature has been removed* I'd like to thank Chaintech for providing this review sample to us. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions, otherwise head back to the front page for some other news and reviews or checkout the forums!
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