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GeForce 6800/Ultra Roundup |
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Written by Phyro
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Thursday, 14 October 2004 |
HardOCP covers top to bottom GeForce 6800 series performance taking a look at four different video cards from Asus, Chaintech and Gainward to find what kind of gaming experience you can look forward to with these video cards.
 GeForce 6800/Ultra Roundup
Today we are taking a look at nVidia's top of the line GeForce 6800 AGP series. We have two video cards from Asus (a 6800 and a 6800Ultra), one video card from Chaintech (a 6800) and one video card from Gainward (a 6800Ultra).
Asus has put together a very exciting bundle in their V9999 Ultra Deluxe and Gamer Edition video cards. Talk about a video card that has it all, the V9999 Ultra Deluxe and Gamer Edition have a big gaming bundle and a webcam! The webcam is the most unique part of the bundle and really adds to the overall value you are getting when you purchase this package. We have tested this webcam and it works quite well providing a smooth 30FPS in windowed mode.
Asus didn't stop there though; they also tweaked and decked out the video cards themselves. Instead of using the normal reference design for the GeForce 6800Ultra, Asus decided to tweak it and make it a single-slot solution which they call the Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe. This video card only requires one slot, and doesn't require an annoyingly loud fan to cool it either. The fan is quiet, and the heatsink lights up blue around all edges for a pleasing blue glow.
With the Asus V9999 Gamer Edition, Asus completely tricked out a GeForce 6800. They gave this card 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 1GHz for the most stock memory performance you can get on a GeForce 6800. They are using a more robust 10-layer PCB design for added stability and have raised the core to 350MHz by default. The only caveat with all of this is that you need to have two Molex connectors for power. But that is a small price to pay for having the fastest GeForce 6800 around. In our game tests this video clearly took the lead over the Chaintech Apogee AA6800 in real-world gaming situations.
Gainward also showed off with their unique heatsink/fan design on the PowerPack! Ultra/2600 Golden Sample edition. The fact that this card was a Golden Sample edition meant that it had an enhanced mode that allowed the card to run 100% stable at a higher core speed and memory speed, 430MHz GPU and 1.2GHz memory. In Enhanced Mode performance was faster than the Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe in gaming. However, you could also achieve these same clock speeds on the Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe by manual overclocking, if you are into that sort of thing. With the Gainward Ultra/2600 you are guaranteed to run at the Enhanced Mode speeds due to the Golden Sample nature of this video card.
We do have to caution people buying this video card though, the oversized heatsink may be a problem on some motherboards as we have experienced. If you have an ABIT AV8 you will for sure have an installation problem. While our card ran just fine with it slightly out of the AGP port towards the rear, we don't recommend running a video card like this 24/7.
The Chaintech Apogee GeForce 6800 was also an admirable performer. While the Asus V9999 Gamer Edition was faster, the Apogee 6800 has less and lower clocked memory, so it is understandable why. Performance was still very good out of this video card, allowing us to play many of the current games at high resolution AA and AF settings. We did have one game problem on this video card when trying to run Star Wars Battlefront. It is odd since every other game we threw at it played well. It was only this game that would not run at all on it.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 October 2004 )
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EVGA 9600GT (SC) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
