6600GT is slower, but it's still a damn good card. Put it at slightly faster than a 9800XT. It also holds up extremely well against the $300 6800NU, being slightly faster at low resolutions (higher fill rate), equal throughout the whole middle range, and a bit slower in eye candy mode (lower memory bandwidth). So you can use that as your basis of comparison. I'd say a 6600GT has about 60-70% of 6800GT performance, depending on the level of eye candy. Also, at $180 street, the 6600GT will save you enough money to upgrade to a better card in the future. When Longhorn's Aero Glass visual system finally hits PCs in 2006, you can take that $200 you saved and get yourself a brand new card with all the newest features (DX10, PS4.0, and better use of the PCIe bus, which will allow for the GPU to calculate more stuff, like physics models, due to increased upstream bandwidth). I'd much rather spend less knowing I have a great upgrade path, than to go all out just to be pissed off when I end up with a $400-500 equivalent of a 9800XT or 5950 Ultra, whose owners are likely rueing their purchases to this day. After all, with AGP, the selection of upgrades will likely be limited within a year or 2, while high-end PCIe cards currently have a $100 premium, making it pretty much a lose-lose situation on that end.
Anyways, as I was saying, the problems with SATA and overclocking stem from the fact that most IDE/SATA controllers are tied to the PCI bus, and when you overclock the PCI bus, you overclock the controllers. SATA is particularly succeptible to this, and drives often fail to funtion after just a few percent of overclocking. Early via boards lacked a mechanism for separating the PCI/AGP clock from the core clock, which meant it was impossible to overclock the bus without also overclocking the PCI/AGP, and in turn the SATA controller. nVidia boards had a PCI/AGP lock, and Via later got it working on their K8T800 Pro chipset, so if you get a more recent mobo, you should be fine. All the new nforce4 boards have a lock, by the way, so you can overclock to your hearts content (except the low end vanilla version, which has a fixed clock so you can't overclock). In fact, the new gigabyte board can overclock 100%, from 200MHz to 400MHz.
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