nVIDIA was the first to enter the 'mainstream' PCI Express video market with the GeForce 6600 class GPU. ATi followed suit a few days later with its Radeon X700. While the companies are different, the technology behind the competing VPUs is actually quite similar. Built on IBM's 0.11 micron manufacturing process, the nVidia GeForce 6600 has eight pixel rendering pipelines and the 'GT' model has a core clock speed of 500 MHz. ATi uses TSMC's 0.11 micron manufacturing process, and its graphics core has eight pixel rendering pipelines too. The higher-end Radeon X700 XT VPU is clocked slightly slower than nVidia's solution, at 475 MHz. Over the next dozen pages, PCStats will try to answer that question as we test out a videocard made by Gigabyte called the GV-NX66T128D. This PCI Express x16 videocard is based on nVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT GPU, and packs in a svelte 128MB of Samsung GDDR3 memory.