A sporty introduction

Product: GeForce 6800 GTManufacturer: NVIDIA
MSRP: 399 USD
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB

When I first saw the specifications for GeForce Series 6 back in March I was like, wow... the rumors were true. This NV40 is going to be everything that the GeForce FX missed out on, a gun in the consumer graphics card arena, accurate, tough and with a license to kill.

All in all a very impressive product judging from the specification sheets that I saw. Those documents did not show what we see now, multiple NV40 based products. The competition is stiff and NVIDIA needed an answer for every possible scenario, even the unlikely scenario's. Example: when the Radeon x800 XT Premium Edition was released NVIDIA exactly that same day released the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition. This says something about the scalability of this generation chipset, it can go higher. It's diverse in core frequencies from top to bottom and that, my friends, means good business. That Extreme Edition was a snap decision from someone at NVIDIA's management who got scared when he realized the scores of the mighty x800 XT Platinum Edition were awfully close to the 6800 Ultra. Now with newer drivers it's clear, there's no real need for that Extreme Edition anymore. In fact, to position the product even better on the market we can see an even slower clocked product then the Ultra. Why? RAW horse power versus a better price, less heat and only one Molex connector.

Lovely, but let's get acquainted with that we are talking about today and that would be the sporty named GeForce 6800 GT; which I predict is the best product in terms of bang for your bucks in the high-end graphics arena.

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So instead of the initial planned two products within the 6800 series we now have a third, well... fourth if you count the Extreme Edition also.

The GT is the same product as the 6800 Ultra, yet clocked 50 Mhz slower and has slightly less memory bandwidth. That's the biggest difference... oh and hey... 100 USD bucks cheaper ! God I almost forgot that. The Geforce 6800 GT sounds like a rally car and is priced exactly the same as the Radeon x800 Pro. That product has only 12 pixel pipelines. Making the GT superior performance and feature wise.

So, how does it stack up to those new red colored Canadian products ? Let's fire up this review and we shall see...

nVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT - AGP8x

A nice deck of cards to play with ;)