InsaneTek

Gigabyte is no stranger when it comes to releasing the latest enthusiast hardware.  The well known and respected company has taken things a step further and started developing innovative features to accompany their latest products.  The previously reviewed Radeon X800XL came equipped with a large passive heatpipe heatsink to allow enthusiasts compute and game with utter silence.  Perhaps the only downside to a passively cooled video card is the overclocking headroom.  Without an active fan to help dissipate the heat, high end video cards can become toasty in a matter of minutes.  Thankfully, the X800XL is built on the smaller 0.11 micron die with lower heat output.  This allowed the Gigabyte Radeon X800XL to overclock rather decently. 

Gigabyte is back again with another innovative release.  This time around is a new silent heatpipe heatsink for the mid-ranged video card, the Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT. 

Gigabyte Geforce 6600 GT Silent-Pipe II

The Geforce 6600 GT is still currently a very popular choice for a mid-ranged video card.  The price of a 6600 GT video card is well within the budget of any gamer and the performance behind the GPU is nothing to complain about.  Since there is a large majority of gamers who own a Geforce 6600 GT, I find it disappointing to see that there were no games included in the Gigabyte bundle.  Gigabyte typically includes a game or two with their video cards, but this Silent-Pipe II 6600 GT seems to have missed out on that.  The Silent-Pipe II 6600 GT comes with HDTV support and is evidenced by small video-out box.  The box allows use of standard S-Video and component video cables.  The Silent-Pipe II 6600 GT comes with a single DVI and a single analog output for your display.  There is a single DVI-to-analog adapter included for those who wish to run a dual display setup.

The whole point of Gigabyte's new 6600 GT is the utilized heatsink.  The entire heatpipe heatsink design is comprised of three pieces--the base that makes contact with the GPU, the multiple fins at the at the back side of the video card, and the multiple fins at the front of the video card.  There are only two heatpipes used for this heatpipe design, with each heatpipe stretching to its own stretch of multiple fins.  The thermal interface used between the copper base and the GPU is a layer of yellow thermal pad.  I still do not understand why Gigabyte continues to use these yellow thermal pads when a thin layer of thermal grease provides much better results.  The Silent-Pipe II is aimed to provide great thermal performance at a silent level, so why hinder the cooling performance with a cheap layer of thermal pad?

As you can see from the image below, the sticky yellow thermal pad left residue on the 6600 GT core.  I attempted to use some Goo Gone and rubbing alcohol to rid the residue, but neither helped.  Most 6600 GT video cards are equipped with 128MB graphic video, but the Silent-Pipe II comes with a whopping 256MB of DDR2.  The video memory is powered by Infineon's 2.5ns memory ICs and is left bare with no heatsinks and no cooling aid.  Theoretically, these 2.5ns chips operate at 400MHz, which in turn means that it will run at DDR2 800MHz.  The memory speed of the Silent-Pipe II 6600 GT is defaulted to DDR2 800MHz, which means that the memory is already running at the maximum theoretical speed.  Let's cross our fingers and hope that there is some headroom left.

Geforce 6600 GT GPU

The price point of the Silent-Pipe II fiercely competes with ATI's new mid-range X800 GT line.  The Gigabyte Silent-Pipe II Geforce 6600 GT comes clocked at 500MHz for the core and 400MHz for the memory, or DDR2 800MHz.  The 6600 GT comes with 8 pixel pipelines, which is commonly found in mid-ranged video cards.

Test Setup and Overclocking

Overclocking:

Overclocking Nvidia video cards is a very easy task.  Simply go to Google and search for "coolbits".  Coolbits is a registry hack that opens up the overclocking option within Nvidia drivers.  It displays the core and memory frequencies and allows automatic or manual overclocking options.  With no cooling fans blowing at the Silent-Pipe II 6600 GT, the automatic overclocking feature pushed the card to a nice 518MHz for the core and 841MHz for the memory.  The headroom for the core did not seem all that much, but since it is passively cooled, the result is understandable.  The memory headroom was the surprising part; it was able to run 41MHz past the theoretical limit.  After spending some time manually overclocking the video card and testing for artifacts via 3DMark03 and 3DMark05, I settled at a very nice result of 590MHz/855MHz.  The GPU sure had more power!  Remember, this is all passively cooled. 

Testing Setup and Methods:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (9 x 310HTT = 2.79GHz)
• DFI NF4 SLI Infinity
• 2 x 1GB OCZ Platinum PC4000 EB (310HTT w/ 166 divider = ~254MHz 2.5-3-2-6)
• SilverStone ST60F
• Cooler Master Hyper 6+
• Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 and DirectX 9.0c
• Nvidia nForce4 AMD 6.70
• Nvidia ForceWare 81.85
• ATI Catalyst 5.10

Benchmarks:

• Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (OpenGL)
• Doom 3 (OpenGL)
• Far Cry (DirectX)
• Unreal Tournament 2004 (DirectX)
• Quake 3 (OpenGL)
• 3DMark03 (DirectX)
• 3DMark05 (DirectX)

Video Cards Tested:

• ATI Radeon X800XT
• ATI Radeon X800XL
• PowerColor Radeon X800 GT
• Gigabyte Silent-Pipe II Geforce 6600 GT