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The NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS 256 MB for AGPAn excellent performing graphics card for an almost mid-price.

A fairly short time ago NVIDIA released the GeForce 6800 GS onto the market and not without success. This model graphics card is performing close to the GeForce 6800 GT, it's massively better than a GeForce 6600 GT or standard GeForce 6800, yet is offered at a seriously superior price tag.

Some consumers however felt left out, a rather big group of consumers that bought an AGP based PC over the past two years. They are a bit stuck, they really can't upgrade anymore as the world is evolving and moving into the PCI-Express graphics bus based PC. But where there is a gap in the market there's NVIDIA. Luckily for the AGP platform owners who are still happy with their system, but would like to crank up their graphics gaming muscle a little, there is now an AGP version of the GeForce 6800 GS. For roughly 250 USD you can get some really nice brute horsepower in your AGP based system.

To be honest, initially I was not planning an AGP based review as over the past year we upgraded all systems to PCI-Express. I had one system left and it's only a crummy old 3 GHz system so I doubted we could test such a GS card sufficiently as there would be no basis of comparison to other cards anymore. However the mob with a liaison to "the GodFather" in our forums revolted and demanded a review on this card. Hey we listen, I do not want to wake up with a chucked off dead horse head in my bed you know (Ed: For you Hilbert, we leave the crushed remains of your video card... the horror). And although this review will be limited from a super-duper high-end specification based graphics comparison we'd still like to show you what the AGP version of the GS can bring to your mid-range AGP system.

Tagged with a sales price of roughly 250 EUR - 275 USD for the 256 MB models there now is another product available in that very broad range of Series 6 products from NVIDIA. Today's product is as stated the GeForce 6800 GS, feature wise 100% similar to any GeForce 6800 product yet performance and pricing wise it sits between the 6800 and 6800 GT.

The GeForce 6800 GS leans more towards the plain 6800 over the 6800 GT though, as the product has a similar amount of pixel-pipelines(12) and also is equipped with 5 vertex processors. So where is that extra performance coming from you are asking? Well there are two explanations for it. Focus on the chart below where I cite the more important specs.

Product Name

# pixel processors

# vertex processors

Bus width

Memory Type/Amount

GPU Speed

RAM Speed

GeForce 6800 Ultra **

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

400MHz

1100MHz

GeForce 6800 GT

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

350MHz

1000MHz

GeForce 6800

12

5

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

325MHz

700MHz

GeForce 6800 LE

8

4

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

320MHz

700MHz

** Not manufactured anymore

They armed the GS with high-end GDDR3 memory, which now runs at a 500 MHz clock (that's effectively 1000 MHz). So can you smell the performance increase already? Interestingly enough this product might swing towards GT performance here and there due to the similar framebuffer bandwidth.

Let's get acquainted with that we are talking about today and that would be the muscular tagged GeForce 6800 GS; I predict it is going to be a nice product in terms of bang for your bucks in the lower segment of the high-end graphics gaming arena, even for an AGP platform.