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By Clay Angelly - September 13, 2004
INTRODUCTION
The NVIDIA GeForce 6800 product line (6800, 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra) should be
very familiar to most everyone by now. A quick summary is that the 6800 Ultra
and the 6800 GT are both 16 pipeline cards with 256MB of memory and are in the
$500~$400 price range respectively. The 6800 is a 12 pipeline/128MB part which results in a
more affordable option at or below $300 (not to mention being much easier to get
your hands on in recent months).
In this review I'll focus on how the
Inno3D GeForce 6800
compares to a GeForce 6800 Ultra. The 6800's four fewer pipelines and half the
memory than that of the Ultra reduce both its fillrate and bandwidth. I'll not
fight this fact but rather will examine how the 6800 can be equivalent to the
Ultra in performance (in terms of frames per second and percentage hit) albeit at obviously
different resolution, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings.
If you are a gamer (or know one) with a sub-$300
video card budget and don't mind gaming at 1024x768 (with some less aggressive
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings) then this review is for you.
SPECIFICATIONS
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128 / 256MB 256-bit DDR Memory
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Superscalar 16-pipe GPU Architecture
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0.13 Micron Process Technology
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High-Speed 256-bit DDR Memory Interface with Advanced
Memory Control
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0.13 micron process technology
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Full-Speed 32-Bit Color Precision
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AGP 8X interface
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12 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
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NVIDIA CineFX 3.0 engine
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NVIDIA UltraShadow II technology
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NVIDIA Intellisample 3.0 technology
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NVIDIA High-Precision Dynamic-Range (HPDR)
technology
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NVIDIA ForceWare Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
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NVIDIA nView multi-display technology
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NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control 3.0
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400MHz RAMDACs supports 2048x1536 resolution at 85Hz
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Highest DVI output up to 1600x1200 resolution
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128-bit studio-precision computation
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Integrated full MPEG encode and decode support
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Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder up to 1024*768
resolution (not VIVO equipped)
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DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5 optimizations and support
TESTING CONFIGURATION
System Specifications
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MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
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A64 3200+ ClawHammer L2/1024K
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Mushkin 1GB(512MBx2) PC-3500 Level One Dual Pack
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Antec True Power 480W
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Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40GB 7200RPM ATA-133 Hard Disk
Drive (2)
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Hitachi CM721F CRT Monitor - 19-Inch
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32-Bit Color / Vsync Disabled / 85Hz Refresh Rate
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Forceware 65.76 WHQL Candidate for GeForce cards
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Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (Release
Candidate 2)
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Microsoft DirectX 9.0c
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Inno3D
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BFG Technologies GeForce 6800 Ultra OC @ default clocks (425/1100)
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Inno3D GeForce 6800 @ default clocks (325/700) and overclocked (345/750)
BIOS Settings
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Memory Timings 2-3-3-5
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200MHz Front Side Bus
Synthetic Benchmarks
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3DMark03 Build 340
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Aquamark3
Games Tested
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Doom 3 - v1.0.1262 - High Quality
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Unreal Tournament 2004 - v3270 - All settings maxed out
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Rome: Total War Demo - All settings maxed out
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Colin McRae Rally 2005 Demo - All settings maxed out
OVERCLOCKING
Some recent reviews of this card claim to have reached overclocked speeds of
380/800. I was unable to even approach this with 345/750 being the highest 100%
stable setup across all of the games and synthetics used to benchmark in this
review. Overclocking made very little or no difference in some situations so
those results are not included.
Next Page: Packaging and Card Photos
Last Updated on September 13, 2004
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