GeForce 6600GT SLI.

GeForce 6600GT SLI.
Updating my retro reverse sleeper machine from a socket A athlon to a socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 and trying out SLI for the first time.

[@oldhuntersu]

An interesting video that brightened up my evening. Thank you so much for this work, for the good mood that you gave us!

[@66mhzbrain]

Thanyou for taking thw time to watch it 😊

[@TheVanillatech]

Great card. One of the best Nvidia cards, maybe even one of the best mid range gaming cards ever. I came so close to buying one to replace a Geforce 4 ti, after checking all the benchmarks and reviews the 6600GT was easily the best bang for buck card out there that still let you play the newest titles like Doom 3 smoothly. Saved the £145, went on eBuyer to buy it, and then I saw a Leadtek 6800 XT (basically a souped up 6800 LE) for just £160! Just £15 more than the 6600GT I wanted. The 6800 XT had 256MB, rather than the 128MB on the 6600GT, but it also had a wider memory bus. HOWEVER, the 6600GT (according to the benchmarks I checked) was actually faster in some games at lower resolutions. The 6800XT was faster at 1280 and beyond, but lets face it ... only a 6800GT or 6800 Ultra had the horsepower to play in the highest resolutions on modern games. So what was this 6800XT? Mid range or high end? Kinda neither, as the 6600GT was quicker in 800x600 / 1024x768 ... and the 6800XT faster in 1280x1024 / 1600x1200 BUT lacked the minerals to give smooth gameplay there anyway. Then I read, on a forum somewhere, while debating in my head what to do .... that it was possible to unlock a 6800XT's masked vertex and pixel pipes with Rivatuner. But ONLY if the PCB was version A.0 - and nothing on eBuyer told me what version that 6800XT was. So anyways, I decided to risk it - borrowed an extra £15 from my Dad, and ordered the 6800XT. Turned out to be A.0 revision. Rivatuner was super easy to use to unlock ALL the masked pipes, vertex and pixel. I ran tests before and after. 3DMark 03 went from 6400 points to 9600 points! An extra 33% performance for free! And there were zero artifacts or crashes! So pleased! Twice as quick as the 6600GT I was planning to get AND I'd basically scored a full blown 6800GT for £100 less than they were listed for on eBuyer. In the end, I used Rivatuner to mask 1/2 the vertex and pixel pipes again, cos I was afraid of damaging the card, and even with just 1/2 of them unmasked, performance was still incredible and I even overclocked the card a little. Butcher Bay, Doom 3, Half Life 2, Dawn of War, Warcraft III .... that was a great few years of gaming on that card.

[@66mhzbrain]

Sounds cool. I've got my eye on 7800GTs to replace the 6600s, they seem cheaper and easier to get so that will probably be what I aim for in a few months.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@66mhzbrain Yeah they were mega popular, I noticed there are always a lot of them available for decent prices on eBay. UGLY cards though, the majority of them have that huge grey shroud and dual fan, at least compared to the sexy 6600GTs with silent cooling (Gigabyte models right?). But very fast in legacy DX9 titles of that era. A friend of mine bought the 7800 Ultra and it was faaaast. He'd upgraded from a 9700Pro and it was night and day. Still, I won the value league, with my no frills 6800XT that I fully unlocked! Did you get any stuttering when using SLI? I heard it was a thing back in the day, but I never got any with HD4770's - although I did only play a handful of games with them at the time. I didn't widely test them or keep them for very long.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@66mhzbrain I remember how I financed that 6800XT too. See I had that GF4 Ti4800SE for years, and I loved it, but all I played was Quake III. So it was fine. Then I noticed some newer games were coming out like Doom 3, and I'd tried the leaked alpha and gotten like 7fps. Then I got (for free) an FX5600 Ultra from a dodgy friend. Stoked, I installed it and ran 3DMark 2003, and it was pretty damn shite. I was shocked really, wasn''t FX series supposed to be amazing in DX9? It didn't even double my score from the 4800SE. Went from like 900 to around 1500, but the synthetic (especially the trolls) was still jerky. So - I had a drug dealer friend at the time, who had a gaming PC with a GF2 GTS still. His PC was so bad, he didn't even realize it. He'd happily play with 10-15fps and think it was "playable". So I took the two cards over and said "Which one do you want?". He hated spending money, tried offering me weed for one of them, I declined. In the end I said "Listen, keep this brand new state of the art 5600 Ultra for a week, then tell me if you want it". I installed it for him, along with some new games, and immediately left his flat. AN HOUR LATER he calls me "I'll give you AN OUNCE for that card right now!". LOL! I said "NO, I want £100! I don't smoke weed!". He said "SELL IT THEN!". I said "NO I'm not a fricken drug dealer mate!". So anyways, I said pay me in a week. No rush. We agreed on £80 plus his old GF2 GTS. I asked him how the card was he said "It's fuckin AMAZING I can run everything at max and its so smooth!". With him, I guessed that meant 30-40fps! :P So that's where the bulk on the money came from for the 6800XT. I still have the 4800SE, in a retro rig. It's done 10,000 hours + on Q3 and still alive! They can bury me with that card...

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Interesting video. I had a few 6600GT’s back in 2006 if I remember correctly. The ones with passive cooling reached an incredible 100 degrees Celsius oftentimes in games.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, haha yes I can beleive it. Theres quite a bit if heat come fromt he machine though mostly its from the heatsink on the nforce 4 chio.

[@RaPtOr9600]

That cooler looks hefty, and fits perfectly with build. 6600 GT was peoples champ :) And i do love your lava lamps setup i have red one, and there is just something mesmerizing about them

[@66mhzbrain]

Haha yes , I love the cooler. The whole build looks nice next to the lamps. Looking forward to gaming on it when the dark winter nights set in😁

[@RaPtOr9600]

@@66mhzbrain When winter come remember swap out for red fan for extra comfy feeling.

[@whilsyPL]

Great content, more SLI and CF please :)

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou😊 plan is to get some better (maybe over powered for socket 939) cards in sli, put in solid state storage, more memory and uograde the sound😁

[@nazknuckles285]

Really enjoyed this one! Looking at your final gameplay footage, the slow downs when moving mouse, dropping to single digit FPS iwld say IDE hard drive and it's running at ATA100. SSD or any sata drive should give you a alot, just in terms of everything really. I see the effort in putting these videos out, thumbs up from me.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, thanks for taking the time to check it out! Yes, I had planned on an ssd to begin with but the one I had seemed to dead. I'll be doing another vid on this upgrading storage and graphics etc. at some point.

[@sonyericssoner]

My config around that time was 4600+x2 -later- 6400+x2 and 2x 7600GT PCIE GDDR3, one gpu was also passively cooled. Still have the parts and bought a second passive gpu for retro build

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, I think I'll upgrade to something similar at some point

[@RockstarRunner7]

I had a very similar system back when this was the current hardware. I had a 6800GTS, and eventually when games started getting framey, I picked up another for quite cheap, and things went back to being smooth.

[@RockstarRunner7]

Other parts where Asus A8N SLI Deluxe, Athlone 64X2 4800(I think), SB X-Fi Xtreme gamer

[@66mhzbrain]

Sounds cool. First time for me with sli. Seems pretty smoothe aof far and showed a decent bump over a single card. Looking forward to playing a few other games on it!

[@RockstarRunner7]

Yeah, I remember being very happy with adding the second card for cheap.

[@RockstarRunner7]

And funnily enough, I still have the CPU and one of the 6800's in my parts collection.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, maybe you should getnthem out for a build😁

[@hatelove005]

Good video

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou!

[@quadzilla9142]

Nice video! Calm and informative:) I plan to make a similar build, only on a rare board on a 754 socket with SLI support. unfortunately, SLI runs on PCIe x4. Will I lose much in productivity?

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou😁 2x x4? Not sure Ive heard of that. I know there isn't much difference between 2 cards at x8 and 2 at x16 except maybe very high res but I would imagine 2x x4 might be a bottleneck.

[@mealot7613]

At 3:15 top left cap will need replacing as its on its way out.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool thanks. Going to do the whole board when I get time.

[@thedopplereffect00]

Back then you really had to match your LCD to your video card. Going outside the native resolution of the monitor would result in a terrible loss of images quality with blurry rescaling. You were better of turning down AA and quality settings until you got a stable 40-60 FPS.

[@66mhzbrain]

It seemed to stop me anyway, at least in doom 3. Ill be looking for fadter cards and a faster cpu and try to find nice looking cards as it woukd be a shame not to.

[@aaldrich1982]

in your adventures in retro have you found either ATi or nVidia to be more stable/compatible?

[@66mhzbrain]

I've never really noticed any problems with either that I can think of. I suppose were lucky that there are now mature drivers for everything and plenty of info around on which ones to use. I tend to have mostly ati cards I think post 3dfx.

[@TheLiquidlane]

Hey out of interest, how does windows XP handle SSD's with TRIM being important for the lifespan of them? Does it do that natively or is there some sort of patch that adds it in?

[@66mhzbrain]

I think you need 3rd party software to add trim support. As I understand it modern ssd's wont really suffer from not doing it and any slowdown you'd get would be probably not worth worrying about given that it wont be going as fast as it could be with modern systems anyway and will still be way faster that what youd normally have. I probably wont bother.