Anyone have a 6600gt?
 

I just got a leadtek 6600gt agp version, and benchmarks run great on it. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of games. I'm lucky to break 35 fps with AA, AF, and shadows turned off! I'm also seeing serious banding in games. Any help with this would be apreciated.

I have done a clean install of XP, am running the latest drivers, and have updated drivers for every part in my system.

I'm running a 2600+ Barton chip, 1 gb of dual channeled PC 3200 ram, and the new leadtek card currently.

What games are you having problems with?

I have an eVGA 6600GT AGP in the mail and I should get it in a few days. After I get it in my machine I'll post my results :) Right now I have a 5700LE so anything is going to be better than that :p

Any of them.

I haven't been able to break 30fps in Splinter cell, or Unreal Tournament.

The game thats performance really ticks me off is City of Heroes tho. While I don't get the graphical lag that I got before, the framerates really aren't much better than the GeForce 4 MX440 I used to have!

What resolution are you playing the games at?

1024x768 with AA and AF turned off.

The support people for leadtek are convinced that my low framerates are caused by packet loss over my network from playing online games, wtf?

They are on crack, seriously. I can't even get decent fps playing offline.

6800 OC on the way! I usually consider myself old & jaded about this stuff but the anticipation is gettin' good.

You're right, something's wrong if you aren't doing better than a 440.

I can't imagine the WHQL driver would be that slow but which Forceware version are you using? From Leadtek, Nvidia, or other? Give one of the beta's a try to compare performance. I'm using 71.24 with good results.

I keep an eye on places like guru3d:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=10

I've tried the WHQL ones, the latest beta ones, the Omega drivers, the Valance Drivers, no significant difference.

Well I put my eVGA 6600GT AGP in my machine yesterday and so far I have no complaints. I don't have City of Heroes or Splinter Cell so I can't really compare results, but playing World of Warcraft at 1280x1024 with all the features turned up, I'm getting anywhere from 40-75 FPS, whereas with my 5700LE I was getting 15-25. Performance in Everquest 2 is also much, much better, although I'm not sure how to find out FPS in EQ2 so don't have a number :) So far I'm happy with the 6600GT, we'll have to see how it does over time.

I have a evga 6600gt pci-e on my a8n-sli deluxe. The card is freaking sweet I was going to buy two but one is more than powerful enough. Is it becasuse of it being pci-e or the comp?

PCI-E and AGp are functionally about the same right now, you won't see a big change until the future.

Sounds like you've got a busted card, dude. I got a Leadtek 6600GT/AGP and I get 250fps in Quake 3/Linux at 1280x1024 with all the bells and whistles, and 60fps in Doom 3/Linux at "High" quality (1024x768).

Could conceivably be your motherboard or motherboard drivers, though. You might also check in the BIOS and make sure you've got AGP Fast Write and AGP 8x turned on.

I am not a complete moron, I've checked everything like that. If you read the nvidia boards, about 50-75% of people are having serious problems with the 6600 series. About half the cards are shit.

According to the articles I've read, many of the cards are having problems with heating solutions not being properly connected to the card. Maybe your card's heatsink came up while you were installing or otherwise and your card is trying to force subpar performance so it won't burn up..

I looked to a few forums since I should be getting my XFX 6600 GT AGP in the mail tomorrow and found that 6600 doesn't play nicely with SiS chipsets. If you have an SiS mobo, the nVidia guys recommend using 67.03.

Anyways, I hope you find a solution and also hope my 6600 doesn't act screwy on me..

[edit] Oh, and try turning fastwrites off and see what happens

That's actually a really really good hypothesis. The GeForce 6 series is known for its thermal throttling. If the videocard gets too hot then the performance is lowered drastically until the temperature is safe. This is mainly in place for overclockers who want to test their cards without burning them up. It seriously sounds like some of these 6600s are overheating.

-Lasereth

Do you know what temperature the GF6 series considers "too hot"? The temp on mine will climb to 60C then drop to 56, then back to 60, like it's doing thermal throttling or something. However, the temperature monitoring utility (provided by nvidia) shows 60C as being well in the "green" area of the graph.

http://www.djskaven.com/~skaven/yatta/temp.jpg

Have you checked that during games?

-Lasereth

I'm not really able to check that accurately during games; I've got a waterblock on the GPU so temp recovery happens really really fast. After unloading the game so I can see the temperature monitor, the temp has already dropped down to ~45C. In the screenshot above I was running glxgears fullscreen in the background, which gives the GPU some load (and puts the card into a 3D clocks configuration).

The 6800 OC arrived. Ah, the elixir of geek-youth! :)

You guys are probably right about the 6600gt cooling. This one certainly gets warm with looped benchmarks. Time for another water block.

Obligatory Doom3 demo1: 83.6fps, 4th loop, high quality, 1024x768.

Got my XFX 6600 GT yesterday, and played halflife 2 all day- no such weird problems it seems so many people are experiencing with this chip. I'm so happy!!

All my games seem to play on par to exactly what I expected, but I haven't recorded any fps yet in any of them- but I did break 9000 in 3dMark03 after overclocking (and the potential to overclock this card is great).

Temps seem pretty average, I got mine to throttle up to ~70c while under load, and hangs around 55c when idling around. These temps are pretty average for nVidia cards, I think.

I am not sure if anyone mentioned this to you Irishsean, but make sure your video card is connected to your powersupply. It makes a WORLD of difference.

Thats the first thing I checked.

Good deal. That was the first thing I forgot :)

Not to beat a dead horse... I once had a flaky molex connector that kept the 9800 from getting power. It'd crash & die all over the place. Not the same symptoms but I suppose it could be called underperforming. :/

You've probably already tried the card in another system?

Yeah, the card never crashed, was just slower than dog snot in everything except benchmarks.

I've now RMA'd it and a 6800nu is in the mail to me...