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Albatron GeForce 6800GT Videocard Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 05 October 2004 |
PCStats has reviewed the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The nVidia GeForce 6800 GPU is a powerful chip, as are videocards based on it like the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The 'NV40' GPU is the backbone of the 6800-series, and comes in a couple flavours; 6800 (12 pipe lines), 6800GT (16 rendering pipelines, 350MHz core), 6800 Ultra (16 rendering pipelines, 400MHz core), and the as of yet unavailable 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition (16 rendering pipelines, 450MHz core).
 Albatron GeForce 6800GT Videocard Review
With so many differently clocked 6800 models to choose from, consumers have a couple of routes to follow. They can shop on price points alone, or shop smart and overclock for a little after-the-fact performance upgrade.
For example, the Albatron GeForce 6800GT is not quite as fast 6800 Ultra version, but with its core running at 350MHz it is still plenty powerful, and a heck of a lot less expensive than a 6800 Ultra. It's also safe to assume that the 6800GT is overclockable to Geforce 6800 Ultra levels (400MHz core), and in fact in our own round of testing we were able to push this card as fast as 433MHz!
For some reason brand loyalty is especially strong in the videocard market. Because of this many ATI loyalists have counted nVidia out for the game lately. With results like those we've just shown you, nVidia is certainly addressing their problems and producing some very quick technology.
This of course is good news for you and I, since healthy competition should in theory keep prices down. It's also nice to see that nVidia have worked around the issues that plagued its GeForceFX line; namely noise from the videocard and comparatively poorer image quality.
While the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra was dubbed the 'vacuum cleaner' for its noisy heatsink, the Albatron 6800GT is nearly silent under power. Pretty amazing when you consider it's single-slot heatsink is cooling 222 million (GPU) transistors!
Overall I'd still give ATI the edge when it comes to image quality, but nVidia has certainly improved their products by a large margin, and IQ on a GeForce 6800 platform is very nice indeed. Ultimately though, the Albatron 6800GT is great 8X AGP videocard. Sure it retails for $430, but it is easily one of the fastest on the block. Compared to some other 6800GT's on the market, you might even save enough to buy yourself a copy of Doom 3. So, for those of you looking for a lightning fast AGP videocard in the nVidia colours, the Albatron 6800GT is fine example of what makes this such an exciting time!
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