Excellent news, I too just got told that my FX5900 has been replaced by a new one that's in the mail! WooHoo!

Hi Roger...!
Just this minute re-run my 3D mark '01 again, same settings as yours, benchmark result= 12,842 3D Marks.
Everything runs fine, excellent FPS numbers, speed, full reflections, etc...
But not as good as Congo's benchmark...Can't figure that out... ...!

(To get compatible results I always use the same program, my free version of 3D Mark '01)... ...!

Cheers...!

Paul... 8)...!

Initial conclusion.

Total waste of money. Had better performance with my old 9700Pro. All this nonsense about turning off Fast Writes and stuff. And I've had more lock-ups, stuttering and CTDs today than in the whole time I was using my old GeForce 3 and the 9700 Pro.

So much for the 6600GT. Come back ATI - all is forgiven.

As I go to my bed at 2.30am our time with FS2004 just having crashed again yes, I can now say I positively DISLIKE this card. It's a 5p special listing day on ebay tomorrow (er.. today) - guess what's gonna be on it.

Hi Paul, state of play so far.

Grudgingly, do see a good improvement in graphics quality but no big jump up in FR. It doesn't like water and you can see a big FR drop when you turn towards the water in my Kai Tak scenery. High detail water kept crashing the sim as well. In fact it was useless with the official nVidia driver. The best driver I've found so far is version 78.10 which is unofficial from guru3D and with that water in the sim is not that  good. But there you go, water in the sim is lousy anyway compared to MOST other games progs (NOTE MS - YOU NEED TO DO MUUUUUUCH BETTER IN THE NEXT VERSION).

Using Coolbits, the best I've got up to is 570 core/1010 memory but if I run at that it seems to hang eventually - presumably because it's getting hot. No chance of doing much damage to this one then because when I check the temp I've never even seen 70deg.

This is the PNY Verto version BTW. I went for it because you're not paying extra for stoopid games and other apps you don't want. Before I decided on it I found info saying it O/Cd to 579 core/1060 memory but I can't get that.

Congo's BMs are still a mystery. Have no idea how to possibly get anywhere near them. I can't even match yours Paul.

All in all, OK it's not an expensive card but I'm a bit disappointed as I expected a bit more from it than what I'm getting. With the guru3D driver it now seems relatively stable but I'm sick of seeing the 'one of your disks needs checking' screen because of constant crashing earlier on. I've never had to spend so much time and effort with any previous graphics card just to get to the point where it will run without keep crashing your system.

The other thing that has cheesed me off is that because of the crashing and disk checking, Windows is now doing its usual trick of breaking bits off my system and then refusing to tell me what they are ie 'recovering' stuff in the form of .CHK files. In MS parlance 'recovering' is a euphamism for destroying as unless you're very lucky even with the right software there's usually very little chance of identifying what has been damaged let alone recovering it.

And finally, presumably because of the stuff that's been lost, I can't even 'system restore' now either. I've got this dam card to thank for all that.

That's it - had enough.

Card is unusable in FS for more than a few minutes before fatally hanging every time - fatal for the whole system that is because it's then always a switch-off job and 'one of your disks needs checking'. That ain't no fun when you have a 160GB hard drive - takes something like 20 minutes every time.

But let's look at this.

It doesn't work with the latest nVidia official drivers. Deinstall and put back the drivers it came with - still same result. Check the clock speeds and confirm that out of the box they are 300 core/900 memory.

Check PNY website product section. Confirm that 6600GT should be 500/900. Hmmmmm

Notice there's a 6600 shown in the product section. Check its clock speeds - you've guessed it - 300/900

Conclusion - I've got yet another shafted card. 2 very annoyed emails sent off to PNY and now waiting for their reply. Feel like I've been here before.

Time to..........



........ wait for it........




........yes........





............shove my Old Faithful Geforce 3 Ti 200 back in my machine.

The graphics may not be up to so much but it least it keeps running for more than 5 minutes at a time.

What a lesson for us all eh. Can't say where I feel like sticking this PNY card while in polite company but I really am getting pi**ed off with the whole bl**dy business I can tell you. Yet another battle looks to be looming in the Rollerball graphics card war.

Every card overclocks differently.

Some cards can reach higher clock rates than others. Trust me when I say if all the 6800 could run overclocked at higher clock rates, they would be o/c'ed at the manufacturor.

But not all cards will and so manufactuors backoff to a safe settings that will work for all their cards. Congo simply got lucky perhaps with a good card. I have friends who 6800 gt won't overclock more 15 mhz (core or mem).

If you want t reach a higher clock rate, you may have to change the cooling solution to a better one. Stock cooling will only go so far.

Also, keep in mind 3dmark01 is not a good benchmark for a dx9c card. Its a dx7 benchmark with some dx8 functionality. Use 3dmark05 to benchmark that card, its free too. It is a much more effective way to test the ability of your card.

Quote:



Hi Auto...!

What is so annoying is that the expensive card which I purchased claims that the clock speed is 525 Mhz "out of the box"....ready overclocked by the manufacturers...!

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/6600AGP_Series.html

Rogers card clains that his card should run at 500 Mhz "out of the box"...the standard speed from the manufacturers...!

Neither of our cards seem to be reaching those speeds.......!

I typed "6600. Problems" into Google....WOWZERS...loads of entries for both 6600 and 6800 nVidia cards...!
...lots of un-happy customers...!

Cheers...!

Paul.

(550 Watt PSU).


P.S. Now I know why I haven't got 3D Mark 05....283 Mb download on 56k dial-up, 2-hour cut-off... ...!
...I don't think so...!
3D Mark 01 came free on a computer games disk... ...!

You guys need to settle down, there isn't anything wrong with your video cards at all, they are as powerful as mine..... at least within a few mhz.

These cards run in 2 modes, 2D and 3D, as I tried to explain on page 2 of this thread........ I also briefly explained the technique and software you need to truly test it in 3D mode.

On the desktop, FS9 hibernates by default and your cards' switch back to 2D mode (300mhz). It's only when you are flying that 3D mode kicks in and the speed shifts to 3D performance mode, it's a power saving and wear saving feature.

The BFG card should reach the marks I got. PNY has a jaded history, and I can only assume they use cheap parts, but it is still a 6600GT, so it shouldn't be far off my marks.

What your marks are telling you guys is that you are still not configured correctly for optimum performance, and it's not the video card that is causing the problem, but rather some underlying configuration problem.

This is why benchmarks are so important, they immediately show if there is any major config probs with your PC's.

When I install Windows, I immediately install the chipset drivers, video drivers etc, apply SP2 and then run a graphics benchmark to test if my total system config is correct. That way, any problem gets sorted before I go a single step further. Ususally, if a machine is installed this way, there are no problems, even if you swap and change between nVidia and ATI cards.

If you start messing about installing everything else before you test your video system, complications set in and you have no idea whats going on or what could be causing the problem.

Getting the video engine working from the beginning ensures that you WILL notice if anything affects it adversely.

Typically, your probs are related to BIOS settings or mainboard drivers, rarely does any specific driver have more than 5% impact on FPS.

Oh, and of course, I don't use Windows Downgrade, oops, I mean Update, so I have control over what gets installed on my PC.  

Rollerball, I have a really good home for your 6600GT if you really can't stand it, I will feed and nurture it, and watch it grow!



One last thing, My overclocked score was only marginally up from my stock clocked score, it didn't make that much difference, I mean, the overclock is 10% and the score reflects less than that.