Because the GeForce 6600 GT has massive fill rate and healthy memory bandwidth advantages over the Radeon X600 XT, NVIDIA's performance claims are certainly plausible. We'll be able to test for ourselves soon; GeForce 6600 series cards are scheduled to ship out in mid to late September. Boards could show up in major retail outlets like Best Buy a little later than that, depending on when retailers schedule changes to their floor stock, but that shouldn't affect online vendors or smaller brick-and-mortar outlets. I'm not sure how rabid a retail market will exist for mid-range PCI Express graphics cards in the next couple of months, anyway.

And therein lies the problem. The fact that the initial cards will be PCI Express-only is perhaps the only chink in the GeForce 6600 series' otherwise gleaming armor. The only desktop PCI Express graphics platforms currently on the market are Intel's 900-series chipsets, which require space-heater Prescott Pentium 4 processors that are hardly popular among gamers and enthusiasts. Major OEMs offering Prescott- and Celeron D-based systems may be eager to offer GeForce 6600 series cards with their Intel PCI Express systems, but that doesn't do much for gamers and enthusiasts looking for a $200 graphics upgrade. We'll probably need to see a PCI Express graphics platform for the Athlon 64 or an AGP implementation of NV43 before the GeForce 6600 series stands a chance of taking off among gamers and enthusiasts.