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Chaintech Apogee AA6800 Turbo Edition Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 06 October 2004 |
Also Gamers-Depot has been taken a look at the Chaintech Apogee AA6800 Turbo Edition. The list of add-in board partners for nVidia GPUs is extremely vast and encompasses a wide variety of companies – all of which seem to build parts aimed at varying geographic locations and demographics. Chaintech, based out of Taiwan, is one such retailer that started making a splash in North America stores a couple of years ago and has built a reputation of offering leading-edge performance at prices that often best its competition.
 Chaintech Apogee AA6800 Turbo Edition Review
It's Apogee line of 6800-class video cards are based upon nVidia's current, award-winning GPUs that have support for advanced features such as Shader Model 3.0 and offer some of the best gaming performance to be had on PCs today. For those unfamiliar, the 6800 GPU uses 12 pixel pipelines, a 256-bit memory interface, and supports all of the DX9 functionality as the GT and Ultra versions. Its stock clock rate is 325MHz core and DDR memory running at 700MHz.
While there's nothing incredibly fancy about our 6800 model, the sheer fact that Chaintech ships it clocked at 358MHz Core and 770MHz memory speeds help it achieve good gaming performance considering its price point.
In the end, the AA6800 offers an interesting solution based upon its price point and when compared to the X800 Pro line from ATI or the 6800 GT. It's more than $100 dollars cheaper than a comparable GT, offers about three quarters of the performance too but is still a nice upgrade if you're running one of last-years video cards.
Chaintech has done an admirable job of positioning this card to sell in a category where 8-pixel pipeline cards once ruled. Moreover, it's a nice stop-gap between the ultra high-end and the lower end cards below $200 dollars. While the bundle isn't anything to get excited about, it's the price to performance ratio which we find good. Couple that with some good overclocking ability and you have a nice little card for the investment. That said, in the end, we'd still like to encourage readers to shop for cards that heave at least 256MB of RAM as games, such as Doom 3, are becoming a lot more demanding for more video memory storage.
If you can give up some texture storage in a card that'll offer good gaming performance for just about any of today's games, then you should be able to find this card on the web for under $300 dollars – making it a pretty good performance value.
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