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which video card do you guys thin i should get? The 6600gt or the 6800 le/nu. I've heard you can unlock pipes to make the le or nu to gt specifics, but if im not into spending an extra 100 bucks for a 50/50 chance of haveing unlockable pipes, which would have a better performance?
Good Q.
The 6600 GT will outperform the 6800LE stock from the box, as it's clocked about 60% faster and even though it's only got a 128bit memory bus, that's also clocked about 50% faster, so the memory bandwidth difference is about 25% and the fillrate will become the bottleneck before this will.
There's a lot of people that have had success with rivatuner unlocking the masked popelines, some have even taken an LE all the way to 16 pipelines, some only 12, and some come up with bumpkiss. Making the mod is easy, just install rivatuner, and go through the menus to unlock the pipelines. You've got a 50-50 chance of it working.
You can also go to www.guru3d.com and there are a lot of users on their forums that have experience on this, but, if you don't already know....don't ask any 'n00b' questions, or they'll light you up like a roman candle. Read the topics on the subject and you should get a good idea of how successful you can be.
If you're willing to take the gamble on success, go for the 6800LE, but if the gamble doesn't pay off, you're stuck with a card that has lower performance than you could have had.
The 6800 also has problems with its video processing unit, that the 6600 doesn't have, such as issues with hardware acceleration of video codecs, especially HD video.
You could also try finding a standard 6800 card for the price of a 6600GT, such as leadteks, if you go for no bundled software, these also have the chance of being unlocked to all 16 pipelines. If you can't, you still have 12, which means it'll still outperform or be equal to a 6600GT.
The other issue to consider is that the 6800LE does have 256bit memory to the 6600's 128, and having more bandwidth is always a good thing. It also has 4 vertex units (6800LE) rather than 3 (6600GT), and the other 2 can also be unlocked.
Hope this helps you out.
The decision is always yours, but if you want the safe route, go a reg 6800 or 6600GT, if you're into experimenting and taking risks, go for the 6800LE.
thanks, all i needed was for someone to say that the 6600 gt would be the best performer without overclocking :D