Galaxy Glacier 6800GT
370/500 MHz
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, 256 MB GDDR3Core 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 GDDR3Core 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.
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