A Cool Introduction

Name: Galaxy Glacier 6800 128 MBDescription: NVIDIA 6800 12 Pixel pipeline base graphics card
Info: Galaxy Technology
Price: 320 EUR

Today we'll be dealing with another Galaxy Technology graphics card review. Galaxy Technology is a certified NVIDIA Board Partner and is stationed in Hong Kong, they are now starting to retail their products to other parts of the world. Galaxy Technology is manufacturing low to high-end performance graphic cards. They carry the brand names 3G Graphics and Zeus and have branches in the Europe and Asia regions, so they provide global channel coverage. They offer products with a reputation, products that set themselves aside from the competition. As a close partner of NVIDIA, Galaxy is a reputable company with a keen insight on what the end-user would like to see in their product: quality and unique designs. They offer GeForce based graphics cards from low to high-end. Today's review is of a high-end product.

The product is of course based on the highly popular GeForce 6800 Series and is at the bottom range of the high-end segment, it's the standard GeForce 6800 equipped with 128 MB memory, yet armed with a mighty cooling solution.

Now then, you might say hey Hilbert man... I have seen that cooling before; and yes, that is very true. They use it on airplane carriers. What, you don't believe me you say ? What the... hey look closely man I'll prove it !

See, I told you! ;)

Of course I'm joking (Ed: That's it, I'm revoking your Photoshop privileges Hilbert!), yet you have seen that cooling solution before, later on in the article we are going to tell you all about it. Quite an interesting product I must add, as a product of this caliber, in this price range (300 EUR), is just fantastic since you are looking at the same graphics core as the 6800 Ultra series although it has been down-clocked a little and 4 pixel pipelines have been chopped off. In addition it uses slower clocked memory (and DDR1 instead of DDR3).

The standard 6800 is in essence the same core as the 6800 Ultra and GT, yet clocked 50 MHz slower, slightly less memory bandwidth and the four missing pipes. That's the biggest difference... oh and hey... 100 USD bucks cheaper then a GT or Radeon X800 Pro, which is its main competition. This card still delivers RAW horse power at a nice price, produces less heat and has only one Molex connector. Exciting times in the graphics industry you ask? You betcha...

In NVIDIA's new lineup of graphics cards we can see several new products, among them the GeForce 6800 LE and the new mid-end GeForce 6600 series. Basically the LE is the low cost version in the high-end 6800 series yet crippled with only 8 pixel pipelines and a 320/650 MHz frequency for core/memory. The LE is an OEM product and already shipping, not likely to be found in retail.

To get a better overview of the current NVIDIA GeForce 6x00 generation let's place the 6x00 products in a little overview:

So, how does The standard GeForce 6800 stack up against other GeForce cards and those cool red colored Canadian products? Let's fire up this review and we shall see...

Galaxy Glacier 6800