Overclocking and Testing Methodology

Overclocking

Well, you get a budget video card and you can pretty much anticipate that you get mediocre overclocking at best, right?  That doesn’t turn out to be the case with ths XFX 6600 GPU here at all.

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Here are the stock clock speeds on the XFX card; 400 MHz core and 800 MHz DDR memory speeds.

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Hitting the “Detect Optimal Frequencies” gave us these speeds above; 419 MHz core and 838 MHz memory.  Those aren’t too bad, but I think we can do better…

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There we go, that is MUCH better, and also very impressive.  We got a core clock of 509 MHz and a memory clock of 889 MHz by just slowly moving up the slide bars and rebooting.  Considering that this is a 27% increase in the core speed we know that the 6600 GPU runs quite cool even with a small heatsink and fan installed on it.  The memory only overclocks by 11%; still a good result but it is overshadowed by the GPU’s results. 

Testing Methodology

Graphics card testing has become the most hotly debated issue in the hardware enthusiast community recently.  Because of that, testing graphics cards has become a much more complicated process than it once was.  Where before you might have been able to rely on the output of a few synthetic, automatic benchmarks to make your video card purchase, that is just no longer the case.  Video cards now cost up to $500 and we want to make sure that we are giving the reader as much information as we can to aid you in your purchasing decision.  We know we can’t run every game or find every bug and error, but we try to do what we can to aid you, our reader, and the community as a whole.

With that in mind, all the benchmarks that you will see in this review are from games that we bought off the shelves just like you.  Of these games, there are two different styles of benchmarks that need to be described.

The first is the “timedemo-style” of benchmark.  Many of you may be familiar with this style from games like Quake III; a “demo” is recorded in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback.  When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see the “timedemo-style” of benchmarks playing back the game much more quickly than you would ever play the game.  In our benchmarks, the FarCry tests were done in this matter: we recorded four custom demos and then played them back on each card at each different resolution and quality setting.  Why does this matter?  Because in these tests where timedemos are used, the line graphs that show the frame rate at each second, each card may not end at the same time precisly because one card is able to play it back faster than the other — less time passes and thus the FRAPs application gets slightly fewer frame rates to plot.  However, the peaks and valleys and overall performance of each card is still maintained and we can make a judged comparison of the frame rates and performance.

The second type of benchmark you’ll see in this article are manual run throughs of a portion of a game.  This is where we sit at the game with a mouse in one hand, a keyboard under the other, and play the game to get a benchmark score.  This benchmark method makes the graphs and data easy to read, but adds another level of difficulty to the reviewer — making the manual run throughs repeatable and accurate.  I think we’ve accomplished this by choosing a section of each game that provides us with a clear cut path. We take three readings of each card and setting, average the scores, and present those to you.  While this means the benchmarks are not exact to the most minute detail, they are damn close and practicing with this method for many days has made it clear to me that while this method is time consuming, it is definitely a viable option for games without timedemo support.

The second graph is a bar graph that tells you the average framerate, the maximum framerate, and the minimum framerate.  The minimum and average are important numbers here as we want the minimum to be high enough to not affect our gaming experience.  While it will be the decision of each individual gamer what is the lowest they will allow, comparing the Min FPS to the line graph and seeing how often this minimum occurs, should give you a good idea of what your gaming experience will be like with this game, and that video card on that resolution.

Our tests are completely based around the second type of benchmark method mentioned above — the manual run through.

Test System Setup

Each set includes a line graph and a bar graph.  The line graph still shows the performance over the span of time of the benchmark and the bar graph shows the data in a min/max/avg format that many readers like to see and are more comfortable with. 

Since we are testing budget graphics cards the resolution we use in the games tested is much lower than you’ll see in our flagship graphics card reviews.  Resolutions are indicated in the graphs.

Test System Setup

GPUs

XFX 6600 256MB (400/800)
ATI X1300 Pro (600/800)

Processor

Athlon 64 FX-55

Motherboard

Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI

Chipset Driver

6.53

Memory

2 x 512 MB Corsair 3200XL

Memory Timings

2.0 3-3-6

Sound Card

Sound Blaster Live! Value

Hard Drive

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300 GB

Operating System

Windows XP Professional SP1

NVIDIA Driver

81.85

ATI Driver

5.11 CCC

Software tested:

  • Doom 3 v1.3
  • Far Cry v1.33
  • Half-Life 2 Engine 7 (two maps)
  • EverQuest 2
  • Guild Wars
  • Battlefield 2
  • Call of Duty 2
  • 3DMark05
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