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Round Up and Comparison of 6800GT graphics cards

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset 6800GT 256 MB, 256 bit

NVIDIA needed the GeForce 6 Series - their experiment that is NV30 was a catastrophe. The NV40 proved to the world once again that NVIDIA is not out of the game. Far from it, they deliver more than a decent card - it had features such as SM 3.0 support, dual DVI, PureVideo and is generally faster in benchmarks than ATI's offering. But the most important factors that made the GeForce 6 series so successful is availability and support from game developers. Of course, from all the graphics card in the GeForce 6 series, the fastest is the 6800s. And just like the GeForce 4 Ti4200 was to the GeForce 4 Ti4600, the GeForce 6800GT was to the GeForce 6800 Ultra - it's pretty much the same card, with lower core / memory clock and voltage. This is the card to buy if you want to hit that maximum fps without burning too big a hole in your pocket..

Even with the arrival of GeForce 7800GTX and 7800GT, the 6800GT is still a viable option for many gamers. These cards are being sold for around US$ 250 - 350, that's US$ 100 to 200 cheaper than a single 7800GT or 7800GTX. If you're fortunate enough to have an NForce 4 SLI motherboard, you can buy another one for that extra 'omph' in graphics processing power. While you can also use the 7800GT and GTX in an SLI setup (for a total cost of about US$ 700 to 900), you'll see that the performance gain is slightly lower - obviously because there's not a processor fast enough that can keep up with the pace. The GeForce 6800GT is simply the best bang for the buck compared to other high end cards from NVIDIA.

Today, we're looking at three graphics cards based on the GeForce 6800GT. They are (alphabetically) the ASUS EN6800GT 2DT256, Galaxy Glacier 6800GT 256 MB and Leadtek PX6800GT TDH.

Overview

ASUS EN6800GT 2DT256
350/500 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 350 MHz
Memory Clock : 501 MHz (1002 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 87.5 points



Unlike the other two cards, the ASUS EN6800GT is in a sense a keep-it-simple-stupid approach. It relies on reference cooling so this card is perfect for those wanting a single slot solution. Meaning, its a more practical card for an SLI setup. Noise levels are pretty low and won't attract your attention. Of course, the downside is that the EN6800GT is relatively hotter than the other two cards in this round up - around 5 º Celsius hotter than the Galaxy Glacier and 10 º Celsius than the Leadtek FX6800GT TDH, but it is still within normal temperatures - NVIDIA's overheat protection won't kick in until the core hits 135º Celsius. Looking more closely, we can see ASUS used thermal paste.to help transfer from the core to the heatsink and (a somewhat messy) thermal padding used for the memory chips.



The ASUS EN6800GT doesn't have extra features, such as hardware monitoring. The ASUS SmartDoctor utility can only be used to change the core and memory clock, either manually or automatically by activating a feature called HyperDrive. It basically overclocks the card to a certain degree when you're using a 3D software or running an application which uses 100 % of your CPU time. In our test, the overclock was around 7 MHz, not much and will most likely will not give you any noticeable performance increases either.



Unfortunately, our sample have been making the rounds quite a bit, so there's a few bundles missing (or probably just misplaced). Inside the big box, you'll find the usual bundle - a DVI to analog bundle so you can use an analog monitor with this card (this card features dual DVI output), a CD case and two CDs with drivers, utilities and manuals inside. You'll find the bundled game (Novalogic's Joint Operations) in the CD case, along with the software DVD Player and Cyberlink's PowerDirector and MediaShow CDs. There's also a webcam you could use for video conferencing, which unfortunately uses the USB port - no video input on the card (TV output only). It's a pretty sparse package, but it may appeal to those only looking for a graphics card (or two).

Galaxy Glacier 6800GT
370/500 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 371 MHz
Memory Clock : 501 MHz (1002 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 85 points



It's hard not to think of the NV30 when looking at the Galaxy Glacier 6800GT. Thankfully it has none of the noise that garnered the nickname 'Dustbuster' for the ill-fated GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. The heatsink itself is actually made of two pieces - a copper base that covers both the core and the memory, plus a number of aluminum fins on top of the base. Placing the fan slightly to the front of the case means the card is less susceptible to heat problems when used in an SLI setup. You're not sucking air from the hottest area of the second card (near the core). From a thermal standpoint, it's more efficient than the reference solution, but still not as good as Leadtek's solution. The Galaxy Glacier 6800GT made use of paddings between the heatsink and the memory chips just like ASUS EN6800GT, but the setup is much more cleaner (at least for the memory chips). However, Galaxy might want to reevaluate their mounting method. The memory chips barely made contact with the padding, so you still have no heat transfer whatsoever between the memory chips and the heatsink.



This card has slightly higher clock than the other two cards - it's running at 370 MHz rather than the reference spec of 350 MHz. We did have some issues with this card during testing. It's most likely voltage related than thermal related, because the core and ambient temperature is still within limits at all times. Switching to a much higher power supply helped, so if you want to overclock your GeForce 6800GT, bear in mind that higher clocks means higher power drain on the 12 volt rail as well.



Bundle wise, the Galaxy Glacier has the least bundle. You'll find one game (Nascar Thunder 2004) and a CD with drivers and manuals. Galaxy opts to use the CoolBits registry hack as an overclocking tool - you won't find any other utility. Of course, there's a composite / RCA TV out cable, a DVI to analog dongle and the must have 12 volt power splitter cable.

Leadtek 6800GT PX6800GT TDH
350/500 MHz

ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 351 MHz
Memory Clock : 501 MHz (1002 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 92.5 points



You can obviously see that Leadtek put some effort and consideration in to this card. The front heatsink features a copper base, covering both the core and the memory chips. Copper fins are placed on three sides (left, right and bottom). On top of the core (below the fans) there's an additional aluminum fins. On the back of the card, there's another, separate copper plate of about the same size completely covering the back of the core and memory chips. The fan's intake is covered with a metal grate, acting both as a finger guard and air filter at the same time. This comprehensive cooling solution proved very effective - we're seeing lower temperatures for both core (53 º Celsius) and ambient (40 º Celsius) compared to the other two cards.



One thing that will be greatly appreciated by professional users is the Screen Correction Utility. With it, you can check the quality of your display (monitor and graphics card) to see whether or not there's a deviation in color, gamma, brightness and contrast. You can also call the Speed Runner (an overclocking utility) and Hardware Monitor from the driver panel.



Of course, that's not all there is. The other vendors could learn a thing or two from Leadtek. Not only can you change the core and memory clock with the bundled utility, but you can also set the utility to perform an action (display a warning, forcing a shutdown, etc) should the core and or ambient temperature hit a certain limit. You can set this limit as high (or as low) as you want and even change the polling intervals from 5 to 60 seconds intervals. If you don't want the utility to clutter your desktop, the WinFox Control Toolbar lets you see these statistics on your desktop in one panel, so you could always keep tabs on them..
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The bundle is just better than most bundles out there (certainly in this round up)- two games (Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within) plus several applications (WinFastDVD, WinFastPVR, ColoReal and Muvee 3) for video playback and capturing and other multimedia needs. Leadtek also included some color (ICC) profiles for widely used monitors by several manufacturers on the CD. Of course, the must have DVI to analog dongle is also present, alongside the TV output cable for composite / RCA and S-Video.

Performance

Now for the performance evaluation. It's a pretty interesting round up, since we have two cards sticking to the reference specification and one with a slightly higher core clock. We pretty much expect the Galaxy Glacier to be slightly faster and of course by how much. Since we're using a quite limited system, we'll be seeing if that 20 MHz advantage translates to real world performance (especially for the minimum fps (on graphically limited scenarios).

In general, we didn't experience any problems with any of the cards (except power drain problems noted before with the Galaxy Glacier 6800GT). Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 78.01 & 66.93 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

While the speed advantage of the Galaxy Glacier makes it the fastest card overall in this game, we see that the Leadtek PX6800GT can still catch up to it. However, the difference is barely noticeable and we've definitely hit the fps ceiling with these cards. Only under very strenuous situations such as 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF do we see a significant performance drop.


Again, we're seeing the Galaxy Glacier achieving a higher fps - but again the difference is barely noticeable (1,5 to 2 fps). As you can see, we're barely making the 30 fps mark in this game at 1600 x 1200, 16x AF. The Beyond 3D Caspian Oil Refinery demo is very shader oriented, although it's only using DirectX 8 shaders (PS 1.1). From the looks of it, it's very doubtful we can push more than 30 fps minimum with shader laden games with a resolution of 1600 x 1200.


Testing with Forceware 66.93 reference drivers, we see a performance drop only under very strenuous conditions - 1600 x 1200, 4x AA and 16x AF. The Galaxy Glacier is just a hair faster because of the clock speed advantage but again you won't notice it in actual gameplay (1,5 to 2 fps). In all honesty the performance of these cards are basically the same, despite the clock speed difference.


Nascar 2003 is system limited, however the Galaxy Glacier does seems to be slower in this game. But, the difference is still within the standard deviation and since this game is system limited, we're not seeing anything new in this game. Let's move on.


Looks like shader laden games can still bring down the GeForce 6800GT to a grinding halt. We see the Galaxy Glacier has some edge here, you can clearly see the minimum fps difference in 1024 x 768 (beyond the standard deviation of 10 %). We're not seeing the same thing in 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200, but honestly, with frame rates dipping below 30 fps, you wouldn't want to play this game above 1024 x768. 1280 x 1024 is just barely playable.


The Galaxy Glacier again proves that it can provide higher frame rates due to the clock difference - but does it matter? We're seeing the same minimum fps overall from all of these cards with a difference of 2 to 5 fps from a total of 80 to 150 fps. You won't notice it. We did use the heaviest part of the game for this benchmark, so you will most likely see higher fps in normal gameplay than this.


Looks like even smoke in general (and not only in Brothers in Arms) can still bring the GeForce 6800GT down to its knees. We're just barely making the30 fps mark when smoke is at its heaviest. We can see the minimum fps drop even lower with FSAA and anisotropic filtering or even simply using a higher resolution. Thankfully, smoke doesn't happen all the time in the game.


Keep in mind that you can see a much lower fps in actual gameplay than what you're seeing on the graphs - mostly when entering areas with lots of smoke and vehicles. During gameplay, the actual fps can drop to around 2/3 of the minimum fps you're seeing here. Just like Splinter Cell, Brothers in Arms and Knights of the Old Republic, we see that shader laden games can still tax the GeForce 6800GT.. Don't expect high resolution gaming with these games.

Conclusion:

We could just paste the same conclusion we have with the X800XL round up since we're seeing the same thing with these cards. All of these GeForce 6800GT cards are fast, enough for comfortable gaming up to 1600 x 1200 32 bit with 4x AA and 16x AF on older games, but you really wouldn't want to use it at above 1024 x 768, 4x AA 16xAF in shader laden games, particularly newer games. Even the GeForce 6800GT still has trouble pushing 30 fps in some situations. It's actually worse in a way compared to the X800XLs because these games doesn't even make extensive use of SM 3.0 or parallax mapping and high dynamic range rendering. At least with HDR you won't have the performance hit from doing AA since both can't work at the same time. For real, fluid playable high resolution gaming you'll either have to use an SLI setup or the GeForce 7 and Radeon X1800 series.

While the Galaxy Glacier is faster in some games, the difference is not noticeable in actual gameplay. So performance is generally the same for all cards. Again, it's the features and bundle that will be the determining factor for most people. There are additional things you might like to know: None of these cards have video input, which is a shame because you could make extensive use of NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder/encoder built into the GeForce 6 series cards. There are variants with video input around, so you might want to look around a bit if you need it. None of these card also offer HDTV output. which is a shame since even the 6600GT come with HDTV output out of the box.

In all honesty, out of the three cards we test today, we recommend the Leadtek PX6800GT TDH. It has the best bundle such as applications, utilities and games. But the most important fact is that the Leadtek PX6800GT TDH comes equipped with a supreme hardware monitoring system that's just phenomenal. There are some caveats - if you're planning to use two of these in an SLI setup, be sure to take additional measures to make sure the card gets enough cool air. You might want to consider cards with single slot solutions such as the ASUS EN6800GT instead.

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