GeForce 6600 GT in SLI

[@PixelPipes]

Two of these were often faster than a single 6800 Ultra, and technically cheaper. But even a single one was faster than any 8 pipe flagship of the previous generation. Amazing cards back in the day.

[@Lady_Zenith]

Two of these were never faster than 6800ultra. I mean, they were in benchmark and FPS counters, but in real gameplay? Back in the day none of the reviewers cared about things like frame-pacing, micro stutter and input-lag. And I do tell you it was a hell. I had two 6800GTs in SLI and I had to sell one how unusable it was. The biggest issue was perhaps the inconsistency. There was no attempt to sync the cards at all. I still remember going trough market in Oblivion once and the performance seamed fine, then I turned around, walked the exact same path and it was terrible while my FPS counter was still high and the game "should have been smooth" but the cards got the state where they both delivered their frames right after each other and then there was a delay and boom another random 2 frames. The result was horrible unplayable mess and it was like this in basically every game where you actually needed 2GPUs and one was not good enough. So, the better solution was to sell one card, overclock the hell out of the other one (1,v5 trough Nbitor to core and 450Mhz). After this disaster and out of fun I tried SLI on every generation and it never really got good. Even in the day when Nvidia mocked AMD for Crossfire being stutter-fest (Kepler days) their own solution still had the same flaws. Generally any multiGPU setup based on AFR rendering was awful. SFR was usable, but the performance gains were lower, and the 3Dmark scores triumphed over practical usability. The only really good multiGPU ever was the one from 3DFX, where it was all split to multiple SFR zones (VSA100) or lines (voodoo2), had no driver issues and the whole thing was not even transparent to the OS/games/API. That one worked and Nvidia originally had SFR in the early SLI days as well and you could toggle in in drivers, but the new modern post-processing shaders and differed rendering made it unusable, so AFR took over and it was doomed since that day. Kinda glad crossfire and SLI is dead now, past the 3DFX days it was always a farce with no practical value.

[@pctechgaming1314]

I did a video of these cards in SLI awhile back, I found there performance wanting in Crysis. I should revisit them maybe 🤔

[@remasteredretropcgames3312]

With AMDs FSR potentially working on older GPUs they have not confirmed, my library with its range of rendering intensity choices will soon be an asset to retro enthusiasts. Sloppy floating point reconstruction fests with raytracing and more efficient modern algorithms are exciting. Guess ill be the one testing that since clearly neither of you care.

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

i wish i could do this with 1650 supers with the old true connector. Especially in this gpu climate and the wattage is a modest 125 w at max .

[@Ubereme]

I still have my 2 gainward 6600 GT Golden Samples :-)

[@ceejay2k2]

GPU boxes were just so cool back in those days...

[@pocapoco2546]

1:11 Joint Operations Typhoon Rising, one of my first and favourite online multiplayer PC games!

[@ark9951]

Phil's retro gaming is my favorite

[@MrKillswitch88]

The good old days where poverty gamers gotten this neat option even though some games didn't scale all that well it is something that is missed dearly. Now days everyone is stuck with having to spend crazy money to upgrade.

[@WouterVerbruggen]

SLI setups have something magical, donno what but they just somehow are cool no matter what. My favourite is the 7900GTO in SLI, got one running beautifully together with an FX-60 CPU

[@Ace12GA]

I ran 6600GT's in SLI back in the day, then 8600GT's in SLI. Last time I ever ran SLI. It was really neat back then.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice!

[@McArio]

Crossfire of two Powercolor Vega 56 Nano!

[@cuttingedgeretro9164]

This is the retro content I come to this channel. You are my hero today Phil !

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you.

[@GameTechRefuge]

Really cool to see the 6600 GT in PCie & SLI. A rare treat. Very cool.

[@TechTested]

Always love seeing SLI builds, and glad to see it coupled to a more modern platform. Just goes to show you dont have to have the most powerful GPU to enjoy some games

[@federicocatelli8785]

It's nice if power consumption , temperature and sli troubles are not a concern😏

[@TechTested]

@@federicocatelli8785 true. I don't think temperature or power consumption on older cards like that were too bad. SLI, on the other hand, can never be fixed lol

[@federicocatelli8785]

@@TechTested Indeed It does not look like a power hungry card...no 6/8 pin or molex connectors

[@davkdavk]

Have you seen the reverse engineered V5-6000? There is a guy making them. Would be nice of him to loan you one of those for a future vid

[@davkdavk]

@@wowitsshit9734 It would take integrating an AGP to PCI-e bridge chip onto the card like some of the earlier PCIe cards. I don't really think it would be a that worth it as you would max the card on a Core 2 Duo, that you can get AGP slot motherboards for. There is a possibility of higher chip count cards being made as VSA100 chips scale to something like 32 chips SLI or something ridiculous. Would be good to see some ex 3Dfx engineers amd community members come out of the woodworks and make some savage 8 or more core boards, on a pcie bus with modern drivers. One can dream

[@davkdavk]

@@wowitsshit9734 Yeah there's still plenty of AGP floating around. I have a Dual Pentium 3 board still

[@davkdavk]

@@wowitsshit9734 Me too man. A lot of gear gone, Including my Voodoo 5 5500 AGP

[@davkdavk]

@@wowitsshit9734 Sick. V3 is good

[@RaptorZX3]

@@wowitsshit9734 3DFX games suck badly in XP, so...PCI Express, i would not recommend such a thing if it's doable.

[@eightbit1975]

I cannot emphasize how appreciative I am that you have all of the NVidia drivers and compatible cards going back generations available on your website. It is a major accomplishment to get something like that together and a major relief not to have to go crazy trying to find them. Thank you Phil!

[@radunuta5915]

Brings me back when I had a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE. Something for a more tight budget, but it did the job

[@linkfuture4561]

That was a fun experiment to watch! Those were some pretty cards for playing games of it's era and on resolutions of monitors of it's era. I picked up the AGP version of the 6800 Ultra a while back. I use it in my Win 98 rig, even tho it is super over kill for the OS. It runs much better with XP tho since the drivers are newer and better optimized. Example: Halo CE, On 98 at 640x480 rez, it runs....ok, it's playable but frame drops are frequent. On Xp, perfectly playable, rarely any issues.

[@UncleMikeRetro]

For sure no CPU bottleneck here! Nice video Phil 😎

[@rodhester2166]

thanks for the video. always enjoy your reviews

[@Alex-hn4we]

Good to see more videos again!

[@danielberrett2179]

Not First - Happy PhilDay

[@hendrikkleyn8571]

There you are! Welcome back.

[@PabloB888]

I can see over 30fps in bioshock gameplay, so this game runs similar to x360 version, and that's not bad. Back then I have played games on lag free CRTs and without vsync, so 30-40fps was acceptable to me.

[@Sobbsy]

The 6600GT's were awesome cards for their time. REALLY great price to performance, I ran two MSI 6600 GT's in SLi for the longest time. I had a very similar driver issue to what you saw in this video... Actually, it was a bit ridiculous in my case, because it only made the ground turn transparent, and only on one half of the screen. I too played the hell out of Battlefield 2, and this half screen transparent ground glitch basically gave me in-built wallhacks... All I had to do was turn my view slightly off centre of any mountain or building, and I would instantly know if someone was in there or over the rise. It was so broken. I reported it and showed it to folk, but ultimately it was something that was just never fixed. Thanks Nvidia...?

[@automatedinsanity]

A great example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

[@Cmdr_Rhialto]

I have recentlly aquired the Leadtek Winfast (agp) which you showed in the beginning for my fast win 98 pc (p3 933).

[@ND22M]

Awesome video Phil! I still have the AGP Leadtek anniversary edition with black PCB that I bought back in December 2004 and have great memories with it - for example I went last month to a retro lan party where we played Battlefield 2 :) ! You can still use SLI with cards from different manufacturers, even with different clocks, but the highest clocked card will clock down to match the clocks of the slower card. There are even PCI-express variants with 256mb of onboard memory that will help greatly in certain games such as FEAR, DOOM 3, etc.

[@SUCRA]

Great video as usual, Phil! Back at this time I saved all my money and bought an AGP 6800 from BFG, it had a cool double fan copper cooler. I did venture into the 600s later with a 7600gt and 8600gt both in pci-e. All very good cards, some performed better than the others but that's to be expected. Have a great weekend and thanks for another video!

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you!

[@StonedSolid]

Every time I see the Radeon RX 6600xt get mentioned somewhere I immediately get reminded of the old Geforce 6600gt that is in the video, which was the first GPU I would fantasize about getting but never would.

[@MycketTuff]

Digging up a bunch of stuff like this from back in the day, fond memories

[@LadBooboo]

Noice, a new video! Hope you're doing well, Phil

[@davkdavk]

I had one of those for 2 weeks, then got. 6800 ultra. First comment wooo Those look killer

[@philscomputerlab]

Confirmed first!

[@davkdavk]

@@philscomputerlab Keep up the good work bro, always enjoy your vids, being from the oldschool myself.

[@peterilling1627]

Awesome video Phil. Used to run two sparkle nvidia geforce 6600 GT with a AMD Phenom 2.4 quad core used to get some real good results.

[@ashleyjwilliamshand]

Unrelated. But can't wait for the pcie fireGl Win98 videos (still amazed the x800 pro driver worked seamlessly with the V5100) Great work as always. Would love to see you do a video on the 2038 Unix computer bug as it relates to retro gaming.

[@d.oconnor4047]

Awesome video! The first PC I ever built had a 512mb 7950GT, and I later bought another 7950GT to try out SLI. Safe to say that I'm glad that it's dead now, I'll never use SLI again, such a pain to use lol 😅👍

[@NightMotorcyclist]

I had the AGP version of this card and it was quite the bang for the buck. It extended the life of my Athlon XP based system and helped pushed back any need to do a total rebuild for a couple of years. It did feature lower clocks and had to cool a PCIe to AGP bridge chip which ran pretty warm but it was still a nice card and it was the BFG brand card.

[@CuttingEdgeRetro]

Such a classic period. Nice video mate. If you ever find a pair of 256mb GTs you may be shocked at their scaling. ;)

[@MasterDrood]

Amazing video, ty

[@RetroGPUsandBuilds]

Nice scaling in lower resolution! And fanless 👍beautiful box as well! Would be cool to see if the dual 6600 GT card from gigabyte performs the same.

[@RiksRandomRetro]

GPU focused event, gotta have Phil's Computer Lab. Great video!

[@darkwaterblue]

Had this exact set up when they were first released. Was absolutely terrible for driver problems, HL2 I remember had neon green water on one set of bugged drivers. Was quick tho....

[@Johny40Se7en]

Oh right. Then again, 'neon green water' seems legit for Half Life 2 though so no probs 😅😆😝

[@williamwilliam9993]

It has $190 bundled software including games like joint operations and thief as well dvd playback software the cyberlink powerdvd both version includes version 5 and version 3

[@philscomputerlab]

Good value :)

[@RetroAmateur1989]

damn, Chaos theory still looks gorgeous.

[@dcfuksurmom]

all of the splinter cell games have aged beautifully. even the og still look good with the widescreen patch (i had to use it for 1366x768 a while back)

[@KooYu]

My first SLI setup! I still remember Christmas of 2005, when I built my new PC, upgraded from an athlon xp 1600+ and a GF2 mx400 to an A64x2 3800+ and 2x6600GTs... They lasted a good 2 years, then it was 8800gt all the way!

[@unholy7324]

Voodoo! Holy shit that brought back memories.

[@modernandretrogaming]

Great cards, I used only one of these with my Athlon 64 3200+ years ago and I played DOOM 3 at these days, also Quake 4 ran great.

[@philscomputerlab]

Did you have a nForce motherboard? Yea Doom 3 ran so well on the GeForce 6 series.

[@modernandretrogaming]

@@philscomputerlab Yes that was ASUS A8NE-FM motherboard with Socket 939. I have a few also other motherboards with nForce chipset, also with IGP's.

[@paulwilliams4274]

@philscomputerlab how well would this setup play Doom 3? D3 was the SCARIEST game back in the day!!!

[@philscomputerlab]

Room 3 runs very well. Benchmarks are in this video.

[@paulwilliams4274]

@@philscomputerlab Thank you for your reply!!

[@ares23dc]

I had a Gainward 6600GT Golden Sample back in the days, on a 1024x768 monitor. I loved it so much!

[@C4nn15]

Man the 6600GT what a card, I did upgrade a year later though to the 7600GT which I also didn't keep for too long, back in the day when I could change graphics cards every year.

[@rodhester]

Thanks for the video, thief was one of my favorite games of that time

[@mOddEdLiKeHeLL]

I was planning on going 8600GT SLI on my 939 build

[@lordpolvo222]

super cool :) always dreamed of doing something like this back in the mid 2000s. ended up having a dual GPU system in like 2014-2015 i think though when i had a decent paying job but went with the Radeon setup instead haha

[@nitroxinfinity]

If memory serves me right, APG 8x also supported multiple slots, except no motherboard manufacturer ever implemented it.

[@CMDRSweeper]

From my research I believe it was in the standard, but no chipsets implemented it. Only one I saw was some Alpha instruction based HP server that came with 4 AGP slots, but that one wasn't X86 though.

[@Matt08719801]

i originally used velociraptor 10k drives as my windows xp system drives , they boot pretty fast on windows xp as well

[@sonyericssoner]

Doom3 was wery optimized dor SLI, there was a setting you could enable only with two cards(i think it was 16xAA). Bought 2x7600GT for this game and Oblivion

[@Trick-Framed]

I got a single FX 5700 for Oblivion and was so sad. I went back and got a 7600GS, returned that for the GT, replaced that with an X1300XT and was even more disappointed so I said F-it and sprung for the X1950XT Pro Ice Q. After a week of returns I had had enough and wanted to play games in my off time, not shop for GPUs. Faster than an X1950XT with an overclocked pro chip. I was not that impressed with another high end card until the GTX 1080. That X1950XT PRO was off the hook. I remember maxed out Oblivion on my 24" Viewsonic 1280 x 1024, the walls in the Oblivion towers would look like they were alive and breathing. Something no other card was able to do. It ran 60 fps no problem all day. Just couldn't get enough of it on that card.

[@sonyericssoner]

@@Trick-Framed Well i must add that i first cleared DOOM III with GF4 MX440 and Duron 1100 with average FPS 10, dropping to 2-3. These numbers are burned to my memory

[@postanimus8989]

@@Trick-Framed I had X1950 Pro and i played first two STALKER games, Burnout Paradise, Test Drive Unlimited and Prototype. Even Crysis was playable at medium details. This card gave up around 2010, mainly because lack of RAM. Mafia II was too much for X1950, but im still impressed of longevity of this card.

[@KaziQTR]

I was going to buy 6600 GT SLI single board. I decided to forgo and stick with one of the other GPUs I’ve got.

[@gentuxable]

I had this exact card in my very first PC I bought with my own money. It was an Athlon64 Venice. I remember that 128 MB was already becoming the bottom limit and the passive cooling required quite some airflow inside the case. I didn't bother with SLI even though I had the PCIe version. Unfortunately I sold the PC afterwards but was a great experience and I managed to have a working system although I made some bad decisions on the case, the fans and the power supply, or at least I should've spent more at first so I didn't have to spend again.

[@delukard07]

the 6600gt was one of the best bang for the buck in my pc gaming life

[@teknoman117]

The major death knell to SLI or multi-GPU in general has been the evolution of how the visual effects in games actually work. From the earliest 3D cards and through the aughts, pretty much every frame was rendered from scratch and displayed only once. Compute geometry, run pixel shading, swap buffers, repeat. You could easily get away just rendering every nth frame on the nth GPU. Even older cards (voodoo) didn’t have hardware transform and lighting, so you had to compute the geometry on the CPU and send it to the cards for display. You can sort of think of them as only having pixel shading capability. Multi-Card was stupid easy, you can do the pixel shading in parallel (every nth scan line on the nth video card). Nowadays, the workload per frame can vary a lot. Screen space visual techniques (among other things) mean the current frame is using data from past frames - meaning to render the current one, you need data from the other GPU, and it needs to have finished. Can’t exactly render frame n and n+1 at the same time under that scenario. GPU compute means things other than graphics are happening on there and it may vary wildly per frame. Data may stick around for multiple frames. Obviously, none of these prevent the usage of multiple GPUs, all of the many problems have solutions. Thing is, the optimal approach to using sharing the load over multiple GPUs in a modern game heavily dependent on how the game works, it’s not something the driver can really do implicitly for you anymore. It’s up to the developer, meaning that it’ll likely never happen again. Too little of a reward for the significant risks the added complexity brings. The only saving grace would be if adding multiple GPUs into a system could fuse them into one logical larger GPU. That’s what technologies like NVLink aim to solve. Think NUMA, but for GPUs. Unfortunately even on the largest of the consumer GPUs, you don’t get *real* NVLink, just SLI running over it as a transport rather than what it’s truly capable of.

[@jackbootshamangaming4541]

My first gaming PC that was custom made I got has 2x6600GTs in SLI. Oh the days of Doom 3.

[@Ubereme]

I had this setup but with Gainward golden samples and i still have them to this day. loved it at the time but the lack of memory did hurt but that was addressed with the 7 series. I believe although hard to find that you can get 256MB 6600 GTs on PCIe. it would be be awesome to see them running and compare the results with the 128MB in SLI.

[@OriginalSebie]

7:00 nVidia 6600 GT (2004) struggles with Bioshock (2007) while in SLI!! - wow :/ I have a single 1080 Ti and after all those years I have yet to find a game that this struggles with..

[@MidnightGeek99]

Well, the 6600 GT was mainstream, your 1080 Ti was a high end card :)

[@karlcloudy]

I wonder how this compares to using the iGPU in the CPU you're using... 🤔

[@CMDRSweeper]

Probably a bit better, maybe not on pure FPS in some cases, but you will have more features and less graphical glitches. Do remember that the Intel IGPU is shunned by most game developers and unsupported, as a result where it runs, it tends to have a lot of issues with broken textures and the like. It is best reserved for rendering Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

[@karlcloudy]

@@CMDRSweeper Yeah, Intel has not got a good reputation. Intel drivers frequently have issues with games outside of the generally poor performance of their graphics solution. It will be interesting to see if this is addressed when they release their discrete GPU, or if it will be plagued with the same issues making it functionally useless for any serious gaming.

[@CMDRSweeper]

@@karlcloudy Don't hold your breath on it, at least for Windows gaming in any case. It is corporate culture so it will not change from one release to another, it takes quite some time to change that sort of thing.

[@Pulverrostmannen]

I have two vintage computers with one 6600GT in each still in use since these cards was the top notch, really good cards for older games, you literally cannot get more performance out of Half-Life and the other expansions than with one of these 6600GT AMD3000+ or P4 3ghz 512MB ram and Win98. They still kick good when used for the proper games

[@outtheredude]

I currently have a 256MB XFX 6600 GT AGP card, paired with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Toledo), running Windows XP SP3. Primarily for MS FS 2002 Pro. (Still using two 4GB EVGA 960 SSCs in SLI with a 4790K for my main rig).

[@thesmokingcap]

Love the passive cooling on those! I wonder how the SLI would compare to the GT or Ultra single cards.

[@Hairy_Lee]

The 6600 GT is probably my favourite graphics card that I've owned (although the 7950 GT OC was a cracking card when I got it). Sadly, I only owned an AGP system back then so SLI was something I could only dream of

[@RetroTinkerer]

Hello Phil, thanks for your video! PCI express that early wasn't that attractive to me back then. I waited for socket 939 and the 7800GT, I never put together an SLI or crossfire system for myself, only once I put one for a client, was a nice bump in performance but it felt like it wasn't my thing.

[@Jerre27]

WoW that's a Nice setup

[@CompatibilityMadness]

Great video :) Since 2x 128MB is done. Now... to find the elusive 6600 GT 256MB PCIe.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

What a beautiful box!

[@radunuta5915]

I kinda miss those type of boxes. They were colourful, full of personality

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

@@radunuta5915 I bought an ASUS X850 Pro brand new in box a month ago for $700 TWD. Love the 2004 design

[@radunuta5915]

@@MarcoGPUtuber Nice find dude

[@O.Shawabkeh]

@@MarcoGPUtuber pity those items were dirt cheap on ebay a decade ago, for example Recently I bought a sealed Radeon 8500 for $200 The item was titled by the seller as 'for parts only'

[@Gabbiano88]

I had them 7600gt in sli Loved them...

[@TheDemocrab]

My first 3D GPU was a 6800GS (I was happy with a Tseng Labs ET6000 until like 03-04) and it lasted long enough that I replaced it with a 9600GT. Also, #GPUJune? Huh, guess I should stop being lazy and make a video about my GTX 295 already.

[@Witq87]

Not the 6600GT but 6600 with 256MB from Palit was my first modern'ish GPU. In pair with my AMD Duron 1600MHz I was able to finillay play Doom 3 and Far Cry with decent framerate and graphics settings. I would like to see some old Quadro cards run in SLI, something like FX4600. They are cheap (at least here in Europe) and have more memory than GeForce equvalent.

[@Cpt_Wolf]

I have such build in SLi - 2x FX4600, Phenom II X4 925 watercooled to 3.7GHz and ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe/WiFi. I discourage everybody planning to build such setup for retro gaming, unless you want to sit in front of your retro PC just in your pants sweating like a rat :D. Phenom is not very cool CPU pumping 1.35-1.4V in to this baby, and FX4600 being G80 can get up to like 80*c. In some hot days, it feels like sitting in a sauna here, good side is that during the winter you get free central heating (perfect winter build) :D.

[@Witq87]

@@Cpt_Wolf Nice :D Well, I actually know what you are talking about. In my almost finished "The dream machine of 2007" (time when I started my high school - IT profile) I have 2x EVGA 8800GTX with Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 for now "only" 3,6GHz on air cooling. I'ts an ideal room heater, especially when you plaing Crysis XD BTW What can you tell me about that setup - FX4600 in SLI? What about performence, SLI scaling etc? I'm asking becouse I would like to buy that cards too.

[@Cpt_Wolf]

@@Witq87 Honestly If I was you, I would aim for 2 x9800GT in SLi for gaming. I have two cards of each nV series from 6800 to 9800 for SLi testing, and 2x 9800GT vs. 2x FX4600 is way way better option to go with. I know that 768MB of VRAM is tempting, but it's not worth extra heat and energy consumption that you get with G80, and you can also find 9800GT versions with 1GB VRAM (look at Zotac). In synthetic benchmarks 2x 9800GT is around 10 to 20% faster then 2x FX4600. I did choose to put 2x FX4600 only for that OG G80 factor, but I'm already thinking to exchange them for 2x XFX 9800GT's 512MB. Synthetic tests for SLi FX4600 3DMark 2001 - 58807 marks 3DMark 2003 - 64139 marks 3DMark 2005 - 25357 marks 3DMark 2006 - 19144 marks SLi scaling, well you get around 30 to max 40% increase in your FPS one vs. two cards. Also depends on game which you are playing.

[@Witq87]

​@@Cpt_Wolf Thanks for the answer. I got the point but you know, there is also the "fun factor" and "collecting purpose". I already have few 8800 GTX/Ultra, 2x EVGA 9800GTX+ and other G80, G92 and also GT200 series card. IMO for "retro" gaming machine from Windows XP/Vista era the best GPU is GTX285, at least from the "green team". For the budget version the 9800GT will be perfect.

[@Brenna_stubbs]

Everyone should be using this for Bitcoin mining

[@philscomputerlab]

😂

[@bitelaserkhalif]

hashrate: lol what is the hashrate?

[@radunuta5915]

@@bitelaserkhalif Yes.

[@Ganiscol]

Hashrate: Not in your Lifetime

[@Vfl666]

you mean ethereum

[@ShinyHelmet]

I still have an AGP 6600GT wih the bridge chip in my collection of old parts. Wonder how much it's worth in todays market? :-D

[@T3hBeowulf]

For a brief period of time, I had a pair of 7800 GTs in SLI. However, these were made by the notorious BFG and I probably went through 3 or 4 cards under RMA during that build before dropping down to one card. I just dealt with the loss of SLI until the remaining card was replaced by a Geforce 460 FTW. I only briefly experienced the thrill of "high resolution / high details" but power draw was insane, heat was insane, and performance wasn't vastly better for the games I was playing so when the second card died outside of the warranty, I gave up on SLI for good. I've always wanted to try two Voodoo 2s in SLI though.

[@BlastinRope]

The pc that got my pc gamer journey started had a 6200GT and 512mb of ram... I still vaguely remember starting up battlefield 2 (the reason i needed a discrete gpu) and being amazed.

[@theenhancer]

Hey Phil I would really like to see 1% and 0.1% lows for these cards in SLI, as one of the weaknesses of SLI reviews back in the day was only reporting the averages and not the lows, a big issue as one of the bugbears of SLI and Crossfire setups were microstuttering.

[@dallesamllhals9161]

YUP! We saw alot of that on CRTs....

[@matthewnugent-marcoux3658]

I still have my Asus P5N-E Sli that I ran 2X BFG GTS 250 1GB cards in back in the day with 8GB DDR2 RAM and Q6600 cpu. It was interesting to see what games used SLI and how it increased performance. Still running that board with a pin modded 775 XEON X5460 and RX570 today!

[@guywhoknows]

The 6600gt cards would out perform the ultra. But I never had the 128mb it had 256. I've found using drivers near the time of sli, do run better than later drivers. I'd have used XP 64 bit. We did have it and it worked okay too...

[@trongetsoutofsystem3099]

For Crysis i think you need min. 256mb vram

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

After six consecutive bad 9800 pro's, an X1600 pro that died literally the day after the refurbishment warranty ended, and a 3650 agp that refused to be stable anywhere, i was ready to ban Radeon cards altogether; but, i was broke. That Christmas, i received a 6600GT agp, that was a godsend. Was it as fast? Probably not. But kotor worked again. And i was able to hang on to it, even after moving on to pci express. I still have that card. Only presently sitting to the side because (a) got an X800xl working in Windows 98, and (b) i need a new cooler for it, but everything i can find for the era insists on not being compatible with the agp version of the card. So, yeah. Very annoying.

[@PentabramXD]

128mb vram sli is a good way to find resolution and textures bottlenecks

[@Johny40Se7en]

Interesting number that. The *128*-bit bandwidth is a good place to find bottlenecks also 👍

[@jamzales]

I have a PNY 6600 GT AGP and recently tested. It had respectable performance for agp.

[@AKU-hs2rj]

I had a 6600GT in !y Vaio for a week back in the day. My poor 280W PSU couldn't keep up with that upgrade (from GF 4 MX) lol.

[@hunzhurte]

Hey thanks for reading my comment

[@hunzhurte]

Wo that was fast

[@Reziac]

Have you ever tried the patch to let WinXP use 8GB RAM?

[@airmicrobe]

I have the cut down versuon of that 6200 LE. That card once I wish to purchase.

[@razvanmazilu6284]

I had one of these back in the day, but it never occurred to me that these could run in SLI 😀 I think it was a good card for its time, especially given its price range. It served me well for a couple of years until I went for an 8600.

[@MrLlorance]

thank you, interesting, nice voice !!! I learn English from your videos :) Very legible and understandable speech

[@savagemadman2054]

I used an X850 (which I only recently sold) and a 6800GS in this cards era. Multi GPU was great on the Voodoo 2. Didn't work so great in later nVidia or AMD/ATI implementation. Last AMD/ATI multi-GPU config I had was a pair of ATI 4850, last nVidia was a GTX560Ti. I also briefly tried a GTX680 SLI because I temporarily had two and the stuttering was unbearable, so much smoother on a single card.

[@craigkarsten6719]

Didn't know there was a PCIe version. Great to see it in SLI! Bought the AGP one when it first came out to run on my intel D486 PERL board. Good value to performance card. Eventually sold the card but I still have the board.

[@philscomputerlab]

The GeForce 6 series is very interesting. The 6600 GT is the native PCIe card. The 6800 GT and Ultra are native AGP cards. Nvidia used a bridge chip that could be used in both directions. So the AGP 6600 GT has this bridge chip, so do the PCIe 6800 GT.

[@craigkarsten6719]

So nvidia's implementation of sli was introduced with this card. Very cool. I take it there is little performance difference between the two types just the advantage of sli for pcie.

[@H31MU7]

I had an Albatron and an MSI 128mb on a P5ND2-SLI with a HT Pentium 4, good times

[@CountDuckula07]

I remember that pizza hut promotion, got BF2, Sims 2 and I think a NFS game. Also some passable pizza :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Pizza noobs is what they called us :D Yea I got BF2 and NFS :D

[@Cpt_Wolf]

My personal option would be 6800 rather than two 6600 in SLi. Shame that SLi is only a gimmick today. I think if nV and ATi would somewhat unify their personal standards back in the day for dual GPU's, instead off making hard for game programmers to implement two separate standards in each game at the same time, it would be win win situation for both GPU manufacturers. Thumbs up Phil :D. No pun intended :D.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea you get double VRAM as well as double the memory width, so much better performance with AA and AF.

[@Cpt_Wolf]

@@philscomputerlab And it was about the same price (with some non reference models of 6600GT even more expensive) to buy 2x6600GT vs. 1x6800GT back in the days, so even back then it was no brainer kind of situation. Also if you ever needed more "powah baby" you already had one 6800GT, so you could always buy second one and have even more bang for your buck. Shame that SLi never scaled as nV advertised or promised (neither Crossfire from ATi). My first "big gpu purchase" was second hand 6800LE V9999 from ASUS but for AGP slot. I used to love that card, and what was even better my V9999 could be unlocked to full 16PS/6VS. I was more than happy with this card back in the days. Nostalgia moment you see :D.

[@morantaylor]

I had a 6600GT on my Athlon 64 3800 system and was intending on getting a second card to run in SLi but never did.

[@alincioaba]

I few days ago I just bought the agp variant. It's exactly the same as yours (leadtek) but with a blue PCB. I'm now struggling to make my cmedia sound card work. I used the driver you provided on your website, but even though it appears in device manager, it won't show up on the taskbar or in the sound settings under Windows 98se

[@MainAvel]

I had an AGP 6600 made by Albatron (I think) and it was good. I didn't get an "Ultra" card (or a PCIe motherboard for that matter) until the 9800 GTX

[@Jerre27]

I've run sli setups from 2014 onwards: GTX460, 660ti and now 970. Motherboard is An Asus z87 sabertooth and i5 4670K with a good oc

[@picchioknossus8096]

Awww I had that beast. However I clearly remember being able a couple of years ago that I used it to play crysis at 640x480 with a close to 30fps average on Windows 7. Some low spec gamer tweaks considerably increased the stability of the framerate. Are you sure it doesn't work not even with just one gpu inserted in the system?

[@isntyournamebacon]

My first GPU was a Voodoo 5500 PCI(Compaq Presario Pentium 3 933mhz had no AGP slot). Then i upgraded to a cheap-o GeforceMX 420 PCI. The voodoo card was faster in some games but the MX420 seemed to play every game i had. Voodoo had compatibility problems. When i finally built my first purpose built gaming PC it had AMD Athlon 64 3000, 1gb ddr1, Geforce 6600 GT PCI-E XFX brand i think, Gigabyte brand Nforce 4 motherboard(Nvidia made motherboards! :D ). The biggest leap was the MX420 to the 6600GT! OMG so much Doom3! Currently rocking 1080TI SLI settup. Not going to upgrade for some time it seems. 1080ti's still going great. Most games can play 4k60 even without SLI. Using SLI they can even do 720p60 in Quake 2 RTX with RTX enabled! Beasts!

[@reggiep75]

I had a single 6600GT and a mate had 2 of them as the gains with the 6600GT were truly more than your average 30-40% in a number of cases compared with other cards. My mates 2 6600GT's were always in the 75 - 100% gain. After the 6600GT was put in my girlfriends PC I opted for an 8800GTX.