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Gigabyte GeForce 6800 (GV-N68128DH) Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 08 November 2004 |
And another review done by Bjorn3D has been published on the Gigabyte GeForce 6800. I think it's fair to say that Gigabyte is a company that usually offers rather pedestrian cooling solutions on the video cards in its line-up. Gigabyte is not known for breaking the reference design mold too much, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you consider the high-quality products with good bundles that are usually offered by Gigabyte.
 Gigabyte GeForce 6800 (GV-N68128DH) Review
The company's GeForce 6800 offering - the GV-N68128DH - is quite a change-up for them. The card features
a completely fanless cooling solution that consists of a rather large heatsink
and a heatpipe design. What? A high-end video card with no fan? Yeah, that's
right. Keep in mind, though, that the chip on this board is a standard GeForce
6800, which means it's the least powerful of nVidia's current high-end graphics accelerator
solutions.
Gigabyte's attempt to break away from the reference design
with the 6800 can be declared a success. The heatpipe design on the GV-N68128DH adds no noise to a system but provides adequate
cooling for the core and memory. As long as they have enough room for the
board's large heatsink, small form-factor and home theater PC fans are most
likely rejoicing when they learn about this GeForce 6800.
The GV-N68128DH performs well when paired with the latest BIOS
available for it. It is disconcerting that this BIOS update is basically
required to make the board perform like it should, but at least it does do the
trick. This BIOS issue is really the only negative experience I have had with
this board since I installed it a couple weeks ago.
Gigabyte also deserves props
for coming through with such a great bundle this time. Sure, there will be
people who have one or two of these games, but this bundle really does offer
something for most everyone. You have Thief: Deadly Shadows for people who like a good stealth-based
first-person shooter, Spell
Force: The Order of Dawn for real-time strategy RPG buffs, and finally Joint Operations: Typhoon
Rising for those who like more traditional FPS combat game.
The GV-N68128DH from Gigabyte is a solid GeForce 6800 offering. Although it
includes a great bundle featuring three games that were released this year, Gigabyte seems to have thrown
in this great bundle for "free". The GV-N68128DH is competitively priced and can
be purchased for around $300. That would make the choice easy for me if I were
in the market for one of these boards.
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