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GeForce 6800GT & Radeon X800 Pro Shootout |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 15 November 2004 |
Bit-Tech has published a
shootout between the nVidia GeForce
6800GT and the ATI Radeon
X800 Pro. Since early this year, the market for bleeding edge graphics cards
has been bitterly fought between rivals nVidia and ATI,
as both struggle to make enough cards to satisfy the enormous demand from both
customers and system builders. Towards the end of last month, we had an in-depth
look at the bleeding edge of the graphics card market. Today, we're stepping
down to the more readily available, and also reasonably priced high-end
sector.
 GeForce 6800GT & Radeon X800 Pro Shootout
This price bracket contains the GeForce 6800GT and the Radeon X800 Pro, which are two completely different video cards. The former is a 16-fragment pipe part with a relatively low clock speed, while the latter is a highly clocked GPU with 12 fragment pipelines. In terms of theoretical GPU performance, the X800 Pro tips the scales in ATI's favour, but as we already know, theoretical performance isn't where the money lies - we're interested in how well these video cards perform in the real world, which is what really matters.
Crucial's implementation of the Radeon X800 Pro is a solid one. It delivered solid performance throughout our testing, and we did not come across any bugs or problems during its time in our test system. They have opted to use the tried and tested board layout, which is very clean and tidy. They have also opted for the reference heatsink, which is a competent and quiet cooler - the fantastic overclock that we achieved demonstrated this.
However, we do have to ask questions about the hereabouts of the bundle - at a shade under £300, we would expect at least one title in Crucial's rather bland package. They have included a plethora of cables for those who have aspirations for connecting their video card to many different display devices, but we feel that at £300, the most likely user is going to be a gamer, who is interested in playing games.
Gainward are one of the first to make a concerted effort to move away from the reference GeForce 6800 cooler - they have done so with a large, and very aggressive looking dual fan design. We like the heatsink design because it's different, but we must caution users considering this video card for their next purchase. We must do this because of the size of the heatsink and the possibilities of resulting installation problems with some motherboards, such as the Abit AV8 - we can confirm that you will definitely have installation problems on this motherboard.
We were very impressed with the gaming experience that was delivered by this video card, and we would not have a hesitation in recommending it to users wanting something with a bit of spice. The enhanced clock speeds provide this extra spice, and we can confirm that it is faster than a reference GeForce 6800 Ultra, and should provide a higher minimum frame rate in titles due to the extra memory bandwidth.
It is priced very competitively in order to oust people who are considering buying a GeForce 6800 Ultra, but don't quite have enough money to go ahead and purchase one, but we would like to see a price around the £350 mark before we would give it a very firm recommendation. It is possible to purchase a GeForce 6800 Ultra for not a lot more, and with the extra power connector, you are likely to be able to achieve higher clock speeds by manually overclocking it. The power issue that we had when overclocking the card were the only thing that really let this video card down - if only there was an extra power connector!
Hightech have delivered yet another solid package - the highlight of this package has to be the cooling solution, it was the quietest on test without doubt. We are great fans of the Arctic Cooling VGA silencer - we cannot offer enough praise for its efficiency and silence. The bundle included is also a very solid one, with two full games along with a selection of game demo's and video editing software to allow users to make full use of the VIVO functionality that is another great inclusion in this package.
The video card has the potential to be soft modded in to an X800 XT with the full 16 fragment pipelines via a BIOS flash, which would give a healthy performance increase. We would not recommend this out and out though, as it is likely that the extra 4 fragment pipelines are disabled for a reason; reason being that they are damaged or dysfunctional. It isn't always possible to flash back to the standard 12-pipe BIOS, so if luck isn't on your side, you could end up with a £340 paperweight.
The bundle included with XFX's GeForce 6800GT is another solid one, and is what we would expect when we are paying £300+ for a video card. The cooling system is quiet and efficient, if not quite as attractive as the solutions from Gainward and Hightech, it still does a good job of keeping the GPU cool - even when overclocked to 417/1130MHz.
The video card is capable of achieving baseline GeForce 6800 Ultra performance, and then some on top of that. We found that the board was very stable throughout all of our testing, and it is generally another very solid product to add to XFX's range. If you are looking for a very solid package that will not cost you an arm and a leg, this is the one that we would point you to - there really isn't an awful lot of bad that we can say about this video card.
On the whole, there is not a lot to pick between the HIS Excalibur X800Pro IceQ II VIVO Edition and the XFX GeForce 6800GT, and both are well worth the £300+ asking prices for these video cards - there really isn't a bad choice at the top end at the moment. In general, the XFX GeForce 6800GT provided a slightly better gaming experience down to the fact that the X800 Pro's struggled to deliver performance that was close to the competition in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War and Rome: Total War. Also, the fact that the XFX board could surpass performance of the reference 6800 Ultra after some manual overclocking further enhances our recommendation for this video card here.
Without doubt, the Gainward was the fastest video card on test here and we've always found their video cards to be some of the best designed in the industry. Unfortunately, the price really leaves us with an element of hesitation, and for this reason we feel that it doesn't quite warrant an award for excellence.
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