256 MB NVidia 6600 GT Availability?

[rkoenn]

I am planning soon to do a major system upgrade. I am awaiting an MSI NForce 4 motherboard with PCI Express and an AMD 3500+ 939 pin CPU. At the same time I plan on adding a pair of Maxtor 250 MB SATA 16 MB cache drives in RAID 0. Then a SB Audigy 2 ZS. The final component would be the video. I think the best price performance ratio appears to be the NVidia 6600 GT. They seem to be available now but only in 128 MB versions. Does anyone know if or when there will be 256 MB versions available? I do know that 256 MB versions of the regular are currently available. Thanks for any feedback.

 

[Matthias99]

The 6600GT will not run any faster with 256MB of onboard RAM. Digit-life compared the 6800NU (which is *faster* than the 6600GT most of the time) in 128MB and 256MB variants, and found no difference except in a few benches at 1600x1200 with AA and AF on (at which point the card was too slow to be considered playable anyway). link

The problem with the 6600GT is not that it has 128MB of RAM, but that it has a 128-bit memory interface, and thus less memory bandwidth than a 9800Pro (even with 500MHz GDDR3). That's why it falls apart in benchmarks with AA/AF enabled. Even with SLI, it doesn't seem to be constrained by 'only' having 128MB of RAM.