Which 6600LE ...or perhaps a 6600 with zalmanHP ???

They make noise, too.

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madd02
Posts: 114
Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 12:15 am
Location: New Zealand

Which 6600LE ...or perhaps a 6600 with zalmanHP ???

Post by madd02 » Thu Oct 06, 2005 1:02 pm

Hello,
Its been a while but im slowly building my 'silent; system up.

I have thus far:
CASE: slk3000b
HDD: saumsung sp120 200gb ndic
MB: ABIT SLI SilentOtes (heat pipe for nb....love it ! )
FANS: nexus 120
PSU: seasonic tornado rev3a 350w
CPU H/S : xp120

VIDEO CARD ???
Ok so video card. As for use i am keen on getting into dayOfDefeat source. As a big WW2 game fan... i love brothers in arms on xbox... and maybe a bit of CS source.. as well. Nothing too taxing though i know little about gfx cards out now. I have been running an 8500 for about 2 years now. So i think the jump to a 6600LE will be quite significant ??

Ok so my options are for the 6600LE stock passive or a 6600 with the addition of a zalman HP

My questions are:

1) how hot do these 6600 and 6600LE's get ?
1.1) What level of airflow do they demand to stay stable ?

2) i chose the LE as the clock speeds appear less than the 6600's, thus less temp/heat ? Is this correct ?

3) Should i just get a 6600 and fit a zalman HP ? I was trying to reduce costs here but if the difference is huge..then i will consider the upgrade.

4) any other commens will be appreciated.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>6600
MSI: NX6600-TD256E
194NZD
http://www.c1com.co.nz/shop/step1.php?number=3145

OR

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>6600LE
SPARKLE : SP-PX43LDH
186NZD
http://www.c1com.co.nz/shop/step1.php?number=4620

OR

194NZD
MSI : NX6600LE-TD256E
http://www.c1com.co.nz/shop/step1.php?number=4621

madd02
Posts: 114
Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 12:15 am
Location: New Zealand

Post by madd02 » Mon Oct 10, 2005 2:14 pm

Help please.

Otherwise im going to choose the MSI one cause it red and will match my motherboard..hahahahah

ALso i heard that there is a 7800gtx or something comming out soon, will that drop the price of these entry level cards ?

=assassin=
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Location: Blackpool, England, UK
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Post by =assassin= » Tue Oct 11, 2005 5:33 am

The 6600le should have the same clocks as the 6600 - 300mhz core, and 500mhz or 550mhz effective DDR memory. The difference is that the 6600le has four pipes disabled, but the chip is NV43 (the codename) so will probably still generate nearly as much heat as the 6600. If you can find a 6600 with a passive heatsink, it should be Ok, and I'd go with that - looking at the prices there is not much difference between a 6600le and 6600 vanilla, so the extra performance of a 6600 would make it etter value for money. I think I saw a Gigabyte 6600 with a passive heatsink on Ebuyer.com (for example), so they are available, and would likely offer better performance per watt. It would probably still be more powerful to underclock the 8 pipes of the 6600 to get temperatures/power even lower should the heatsink not be effective.

doudou
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Oct 28, 2004 5:51 am

Post by doudou » Tue Oct 11, 2005 7:37 am

Yeah, there are also a couple of features that are disabled on le compared to standard 6600. Can't remember exactly but i would say HDR (high dynamic range or how modern video cards increase display dynamic, i.e. the luminosity difference between white and black), and maybe HD video decoding.
As there are plenty of passive 6600 that run fine and cool, I'd go for one of them. Just ask Ed (spcr reviewer): he's built a very cool set-up with one of these. Check the forum.
In fact you might as well make an carbon copy of his rig, 'cause it seems perfect, and very close from the one you intend to buy ! (same mobo, HSF, fans, case etc...) !! :lol:

doudou
Posts: 55
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Post by doudou » Tue Oct 11, 2005 7:38 am

Yeah, there are also a couple of features that are disabled on le compared to standard 6600. Can't remember exactly but i would say HDR (high dynamic range or how modern video cards increase display dynamic, i.e. the luminosity difference between white and black), and maybe HD video decoding.
As there are plenty of passive 6600 that run fine and cool, I'd go for one of them. Just ask Ed (spcr reviewer): he's built a very cool set-up with one of these. Check the forum.
In fact you might as well make an carbon copy of his rig, 'cause it seems perfect, and very close from the one you intend to buy ! (same mobo, HSF, fans, case etc...) !! :lol:

madd02
Posts: 114
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Location: New Zealand

Post by madd02 » Tue Oct 11, 2005 12:16 pm

=assassin= wrote:The 6600le should have the same clocks as the 6600 - 300mhz core, and 500mhz or 550mhz effective DDR memory.
The site im looking at purchasing from suggests the following speeds, this was my basis for the less speed less heat comment
CHIPSET NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE
CORE SPEED 300 MHz
MEMORY 256 MB
MEMORY SPEED 350 MHz
MEMORY BUS 128-bit
RAMDAC 400 MHz

Eg mem speed on the MSI6600 is listed at 550mhz, but i guess that will only effect the memory temp (basing on assumption that speed is proportaional to heat)

Assasin, thanks for the info about the pipes..i was not aware of the reduction. Thats a BIG point that i missed. Does this translate to a huge performance increase ?


doudou wrote:Just ask Ed (spcr reviewer): he's built a very cool set-up with one of these. Check the forum.
In fact you might as well make an carbon copy of his rig, 'cause it seems perfect, and very close from the one you intend to buy ! (same mobo, HSF, fans, case etc...) !! :lol:
Yeah i didnt realise i was copying him until i checked out his gallery pics of his 'effectively silent K8 rig'. I am heading in that direction, but have a supply problem down here in lil ol New Zealand, so thats the reason for a difference in the vid card. The 6600LE cards appear to be the only passive cards i can find around my price range 150 - 200(max!). I even extended my search to Australia (auspcmarket.com.au) and there is nothing.

So i was considering getting the MSI 6600 (non passive) and adding a zalman ZM80C-HP($44) or ZM80A-HP($35) to it. But that is heading to the very limit of my budget.

I jsut checked my local vendor site (c1com.co.nz) and they have a new addition legend card for $167. Any comments on legend cards ?

[LEGEND] NV6600P
NVIDIA GEFORCE 6600, 256MB, PCI-E 16X, TV-OUT, DVI
http://www.c1com.co.nz/shop/step1.php?number=4658

doudou wrote:but i would say HDR
I was reading about this yesturday at anandtech, they had some day of defeat examples. Looks quite good. Also i like the sound of the HD video decoding.



Is anyone running a 6600 passive, what temps are normal ?

=assassin=
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Post by =assassin= » Thu Oct 13, 2005 6:18 am

The closest I have to a review of the 6600le is that of a 6200, which has the same pipes and core speed, with only the memory speed differing : - http://www.digital-daily.com/video/nvidia_geforce_6200/

The 6600le may be close to the 6600 in some games, but in games where the pipes matter more, the 6600 can be twice as fast.

As regards the memory speed on the 'le', I'm not sure whether the 350Mhz value is the actual Mhz speed or the effective speed. For example, 550Mhz effective DDR speed on the 6600 translates to 275Mhz actual speed, due to DDR being double data rate - the 350Mhz value may mean 700Mhz effective, which while helping performance a little, would be hotter. Either way the 6600 is the better option due to the more powerful core with little heat penalty of being faster.

In terms of actual chip temperatures, which I didn't mention before, all I have for reference is that my father's PC has a 6600GT which, with a heatsink & fan, reached over 60C on load and idled at 43C during the summer, with an ambient temperature of 24C maximum. Due to the lower clock speed of a vanilla 6600, a 6600 with a fan may get 5C lower or more, and possibly upto 10C lower as the 6600GT at idle/2D is clocked at the 300Mhz the vanilla 6600 uses for 3D. With a heatsink, figures will likely be in the 60C's and could get to 70C or more, but that's only my worst case guess, and could vary depending on the particular heatsink used.

madd02
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Location: New Zealand

Post by madd02 » Thu Oct 13, 2005 11:46 am

Thanks again =assassin= ! Especially for the ddr effective speed info and 6200 review.

Earlier on i was considering the 6200, but with the advent of turbo cache its hard to find a vanilla one without the TC shared memory feature.

I think i will get the legend card at 166 and add a zalman HP (either 35 or 44) hopefully this should prove stable. Perhaps some home made memory heat sinks as well.

It is really hard to find a review comparing the 6600LE to the 6600. That 6600GT card gets all the press...

Is there a huge difference between card brands if the chips are the same...eg MSI 6600 vs Legend 6600....?

wainwra
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Me too

Post by wainwra » Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:24 pm

I have just ordered an MSI 6600LE. It'll be some time before I can tell you what it is like, but it might be useful for me to share my thought processes:

My requirements aren't high. I don't currently play games, but then I don't have a desktop machine at all at the moment (just my work laptop). I expect that once I have my lovely new machine, I'll want to buy at least one game, just to see how it goes.

So I wanted to get a video card which
  • was cheap(ish)
  • had a good modern feature set
  • used a recent chipset (on the grounds that 110nm stuff produces less heat than 130nm stuff)
  • was either passive, or could be made passive
I read up. Decided on NVidia over ATI for no particularly good reason other than it seemed defensible and cut my choices down by 50%. Looked for passive things...

... and found the 6200TC (TurboCache) cards. Read up some more (there are many similar, I've just chosen two to quote). It sounded a very spcr-friendly idea, suited for people in my situation. I found that there were a variety of such cards, and that Gigabyte in particular had made some with much more RAM on the card. The first one had 16Mb on the card, and then the rest of the quoted 128Mb comes from main memory. There was also a 32Mb version announced, and a bit later, some manufacturers had a 64Mb/256Mb version. The one I nearly bought had 128Mb on the card, in addition to a further 128Mb of main memory. (Here's one in stock in New Zealand, incidentally.) I figured that should help performance quite a lot.

Sounded great... so I looked for reviews. :?

Not finding anything (odd, that, I thought), I emailed Gigabyte. They pointed me at this review ... while apologising for the Polish. (They claimed that a number of sites were currently doing reviews, and that we'd see those coming out in due course.)

So. Babelfish doesn't translate Polish, unfortunately. But by carefully looking for the nouns (which tend to be the same in English), you can sort of guess the gist. They seem to be comparing (one form of) the 6200TC card with (one form of) the 6600LE. And while I *think* the summary at the end is probably saying good things about the cheaper 6200TC (230 zł rather than 420 zł), it was clear that the performance of the 6600LE (at least in this case) was superior. I had some stretch in my budget, so I thought I'd investigate this other card.

After a bit more research (not all 6600 LEs are passive), I bought an MSI NX6600LE-TD256E (256Mb) for just under €100, including tax and shipping.

There's far too little information out there. I'd love to see
  • a decent review of the 6200TC and 6600LE cards
  • how that 256Mb Gigabyte 6200TC compares against "normal" video cards and
  • what the heat consumption of these (two) cards is
I have formed opinions on all of the above, but on scant data.

Edit: Please excuse the half-finished earlier posting. I have now wrapping my son's trampoline(...) and have inserted the links, as promised. Plus corrected a few details.
Last edited by wainwra on Thu Oct 13, 2005 1:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

doudou
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Joined: Thu Oct 28, 2004 5:51 am

Post by doudou » Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:54 pm

Ok guys,
i know it is not english, but at least babelfish does translates french. So have a look at that review: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/579-1/c ... gamme.html
What it boils down to is:
1/ DO NOT buy a TC card (or HM for ATI), as they are pure crap. A regular card with integrated memory is at least twice as fast and doesn't heat up more. They also slow down the rest of the system.
2/ 6600, 6600le and 6200 are the same core. le and 6200 have only 4 pixel shader pipelines and 6200 doesn't support HDR nor data compression.
3/ le doesn't seem attractive at all compared to 6600 or 6200 because it is faster clocked (425 MHz vs 300)
4/ all support HD decoding

Based on this analysis, I would definitely spend a few more bucks on a regular 6600 or a 6200 rather than a 6600 le.
More precisely, knowing that next Windows release, vista, will heavily rely on the graphics card for its new GUI, I would go for the 6600. It would be a shame not to be able to run the next OS "full options" with a one year old only computer !

Ok I'm done, it's your choice now...

doudou
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Oct 28, 2004 5:51 am

Post by doudou » Thu Oct 13, 2005 11:32 pm

Just anothe rpisece of info to be most complete on the subject: if you had checked the stickies in this forum would have seen this link http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2238&p=4 that gives power consumptions of 6200 and 6600. They are roughly the same, thereby backing up the statement that 6200 and 6600 are essentially the same core at same clock speed.
As 6600 le has higher clock speed it will consume more power and dissipate more heat. How much is hard to tell, but the ratio of frequencies is 1.4 so 40% more heat !

MajereXYU
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Post by MajereXYU » Fri Oct 14, 2005 12:13 am

I have an Asus 6600 (Non-GT) super silencer, which is passively cooled.

It runs really well in my P180 with only one Nexus 120mm exhaust and passively cooled NB (A8N-SLI Premium) and passively cooled CPU (A64 3000+ with XP120, no fan).

Good quality, good warranty, reliable (Made by Asus) and factory passive.

Only thing is, the 6600 is really less powerful than the 6600GT, but it's no slouch either.

Hope that helps!


Edit: cost me about CAN$170 or roughfly US$140

=assassin=
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Post by =assassin= » Fri Oct 14, 2005 4:06 am

madd02 wrote: Is there a huge difference between card brands if the chips are the same...eg MSI 6600 vs Legend 6600....?
Personally myself, as I've only heard of the MSI brand (in the UK, anyway) I would go with that as it's a relatively popular brand. If the Legend has a good package though and is significantly cheaper, it's worth consideration though.

Beyonder
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Post by Beyonder » Fri Oct 14, 2005 10:03 am

I just bought one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814135182

...and have to admit I'm quite impressed. The heatpipe solution is definitely suitable, and the card is nice and compact.

Additionally, it has a memory clock speed advantage that seems to put it anywhere from 5-10% faster than a regular 6600 in the benchmarks. I haven't tried overclocking it yet (curious what I can get with a slow fan near the heatsinks), but I'll report back. The below reviews got about ~25-30% overclock without adding a fan, which is impressive.

What I really got this for though was the fanless design and pureview stuff, for a HTPC I just threw together for work. (I <3 my job) Rather than pay money and install a Zalman, I'd rather just buy something that came that way to begin with.

Some reviews (although, admittedly, a bit lacking):
http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... cid=3&pg=1
http://www.overclockersonline.com/index ... es&num=296

gogos7
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Post by gogos7 » Mon Oct 17, 2005 5:53 am

Hello,

I was thinking exactly the same, but for AGP version. In PCI-E, you are very lucky because there are a lot of 6600xx cards with passive cooling.
For example, here in Greece:
Msi NX6600LE-TD256E : 104€
Asus Extreme N6600 Silencer 128MB: 115€
Asus Extreme N6600 Silencer 256MB : 142€
Asus Extreme N6600LE Silencer : 123€ (not worth it and expensive store also)
Asus Extreme N6600GT Silencer: . . . will come soon
Unfortunately, for AGP we have fewer options. I sent a e-mail to MSI where I was “requesting” and “hoping” for a nVidia AGP 6600xx VGA card with a big heatsink, like the one in NX6600LE-TD256E, but they referred to the existing models.
Currently I have a Msi FX5500-T128 with passive cooling, which gets pretty hot, but running without problems. I don’t know exactly the temperatures, but if I could (the card is “compact” size, not full) install a Zalman ZM80D-HP, I am sure that it will make it cooler.
So, (if I would like to upgrade) I can get a Msi NX6200AX-TD128 for 70€ and install a Zalman ZM80D-HP (29€) if necessary or buy the Zalman first and then try to fit it to a 6600 card like the Msi NX6600-VTD256 (130€).

Does anyone managed to fit the Zalman to any Msi AGP 6600 card?
MajereXYU wrote:I have an Asus 6600 (Non-GT) super silencer, which is passively cooled.
MajereXYU is it getting too hot this card?

madd02, good luck with your selection

I wish I were in the PCI-E side!

hutts
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Passive Geforce 6600

Post by hutts » Sat Oct 29, 2005 12:24 am

I have a Gigabyte N66256DP video card. It's a heatpipe passively cooled vanilla GF6600 card with 256MB ram. I purchased it because it seemed the perfect solution for my HTPC. It has the new .11 micron core and plenty of ram, low profile to fit inside a shuttle, plus enough grunt to emulate my old PSX games. I have a Shuttle SN45Gv3 which has received the guts of my old desktop plus the new Gigabyte card.

However my experiences with the card have not been so perfect. I previously had the card in my desktop setup and it'd play games just fine and very well but I noticed it was getting way too hot after short periods of time playing intensive 3D games. This never happened with my Radeon 9500 card and Zalman heatpipe. I couldn't read the temps because it was disabled by the BIOS.

The card soon died unexpectedly downloading overnight and I'm still not sure why but I suspect that the thermal adhesive gunk connection was broken when I was installing the card (or in transport).

I've since acquired a replacement, and the first thing I did was replace the termal crap on the chip with Arctic Silver 5. I've also edited the BIOS to allow temperature monitoring.

The card defaults to a 400mhz core speed and I have recently realised that the standard core speed for the chip is 300, so no surprise that it gets hot. Nevertheless, playing Egosoft's X2 with the shuttle fan on lowest speed cooks the card up to 75C at ambient room temp 23C, which is way too hot for my liking. It also makes that hot computer smell that you get from P4 Prescotts.

With same ambient temp and setting the shuttle fan to max speed, the temperature is a much better 71C but the idea of summer worries me.

I've been playing around with the core and mem speeds using Nvidia's coolbits features and with the shuttle fan on lowest speed:
- 300core, 400 mem results in 67C
- 300core, 200 mem results in 65C
- 200core, 200 mem results in 63C

I am replacing the stock fan with a nexus and expect the temps could be lowered 3-4 degrees with still low noise levels. At this stage, I'm going to clock the thing as low as I can without losing PSX emulation speed:)

Hope this helps.

hutts
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Aug 11, 2002 3:26 pm
Location: Brisbane, Australia

Some foolowup info...

Post by hutts » Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:56 pm

Well I tried hooking up my newly constructed shuttle lounge room PC, and it should be noted that moving the box out from under my desk to the open lounge room reduced temperatures by about 6 degrees.

I also replaced the Sunon Fan with a Nexus 80mm fan, and whilst the Nexus is a lot quieter at the same RPM levels, its maximum RPM level at 12 volts is not quite enough to adequtely cool the shuttle and the resulting temperatures are 4 degrees higher.

I am consdering using an old yate loon fan in a now dead Aopen power supply. It has very good noise/power ratio and is somewhere between a 80mm low speed panaflo and a 80 mm medium speed panaflo.

Anyway, the bottom line is that with a case with decent airflow, situated in an open area, you should have good temperatures running a 6600 at stock speed and passive cooling (even better underclocked of course, and performance is still good at 200Mhz core clock)

Hutts

madd02
Posts: 114
Joined: Tue May 31, 2005 12:15 am
Location: New Zealand

Post by madd02 » Tue Nov 01, 2005 1:54 am

thanks mate appreciate the effort and testing results !!!

ive been busy so have put of the purchase....although in the mean time the cpu has dropped quite a bit....Score ! =)

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