Introduction

With the strength of its engineering department, Gigabyte always knew how to develop new products with lots of originality. Their expertise in the construction of motherboards is now applied with a great know how in the field of graphic cards. The GA-660 TNT2 32Mb graphic card is another good example of Gigabyte's savoir faire. This graphic card is coming with a Turbo function that can be enabled by the mean of a jumper. The performance gain obtained may not be astronomical but it is nonetheless very interesting especially if we take into account that the temperature raise is very slight. Let's see together more in details the other feature of this graphic card.

The features

The Gigabyte GA-660 TNT2 graphic card is offered in several flavor with 32Mb or 16Mb of 167Mhz memory. Unlike most of the other TNT2 graphic cards, the GA-660 comes with a fan and heatsink assembly factory installed. As a fact, there even is a second smaller heatsink beneath the card right under the graphic chipset of course! The GA-660 support both the AGP 2X and 4X sideband addressing, single-pass multi-texturing, 32-bit rendering, per-pixel mip-mapping and optimized Direct3D acceleration. Video acceleration and full motion video playback up to 30 frames as well as Video acceleration for DirectShow, M-PEG1 AND MPEG-2 and Indeo are all supported. The GA-660F and GA-660FT also offer Flat Panel support as an option.

ADVANCED 3D FEATURES
Hardware triangle setup engine
Optimized for Direct3D acceleration
Complete DirectX 6.X support
TwiN-Texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline
2 texture-mapped, lit pixels per clock
Single pass multi-texturing
Square and non-square texture support
Texture blending support, including:
         Multi-textures, bump maps, texture modulation, Light maps, reflection maps, environmental maps
         Procedural textures
Backend blending, including:
         DirectX 6.X: 121 modes supported for source, destination and alpha blending
         32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha
         Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering (better than trilinear mip-mapping)
Per-pixel, perspective-correct, texture mapping, including fog, light, mip mapping
24-bit or 16-bit Z-buffer and 8-bit stencil buffer
Anti-aliasing (full scene and order independent)

2D ACCELERATION
128-bit graphics engine, optimized for single cycle operation
Internal 256-bit data paths for high speed Windows acceleration
Pipeline optimized for multiple color depths
Execution of all 256 raster operations
Multi-buffering (double, triple, and quad) for smooth animation
True color hardware cursor

VIDEO ACCELERATION
Acceleration of full-motion video playback, sustaining 30 frames per second with high quality color resolution
Implements true bilinear filtering for scaled video
Backend hardware video scaling for video conferencing and playback
Hardware color space conversion and multi-tap X and Y filtering
Support for scaled field interframing
Per-pixel color keying
Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
Support for software MPEG acceleration and H.261 video conferencing
DVD sub-picture alpha blending compositing
Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo

DRIVER SUPPORT
Windows 9X, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000
DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectVideo, and ActiveX
OpenGL ICD for Windows 95/98 and NT
Standard 32-bit VGA and SVGA support

2D VIDEO MODES

Resolution	Color Depth	Max. Refresh Rate
320X200	8/16/32	240Hz
320X240	8/16/32	240Hz
400X300	8/16/32	240Hz
480X360	8/16/32	240Hz
512X384	8/16/32	240Hz
640X400	8/16/32	240Hz
640X480	8/16/32	240Hz
800X600	8/16/32	240Hz
960X720	8/16/32	200Hz
1024X768	8/16/32	200Hz
1152X864	8/16/32	170/170/150Hz
1280X1024	8/16/32	150/150/120Hz
1600X900	8/16/32	120/120/100Hz
1600X1200	8/16/32	100/100/85Hz
1920X1080	8/16/32	85/85/85Hz
1900X1200	8/16/32	85/85/75Hz
2048X1536	8/16	60/60Hz