Chaintech GeForce AA6800 Turbo

Manufacturer: Chaintech
Supplied by: Chaintech
Price: $289.00

by Dean Barker  (10/05/2004)

Introduction

The GeForce 6800 line as we all know, is broken up into three products; the 6800, the 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra.  Priced at $300, $400 and $500 respectively on average, the entry level 6800 card has gained a lot of attention from those of us not related to Donald Trump.  Offering excellent performance across the board, especially in Doom3, the GeForce 6800 is THE card to have. 

Of late, quite a few manufacturers have been releasing their own 6800 products.  The term 'vanilla' has floated around the forums in the hardware community when referring to the entry level no frills 6800 in part because of manufacturers sticking to NVidia's reference design.  Chaintech appears to be aiming at breaking this mold with their improved cooling and a 10% overclock on the AA6800 Turbo.  A few other cards have hit the shelves that were overclocked at the factory to give themselves at edge in performance and market share.  The problem with most of these is that the price gets jacked up to the point that you might as well spend a few extra bucks and get a 6800 GT.  Surprisingly, there is an exception to this.  Chaintech's overclocked model, the AA6800 Turbo, carries a price at or even a hair lower than most standard 6800 cards.  The "Turbo" means that the core and memory speeds have been bumped up 10% each to give you a little added umph.  Chaintech recently sent one of these 'Turbo' 6800 cards to us here at the Penthouse Labs for a little abuse.  Let's take a look at Chaintech's mold breaking 6800 and what it has to offer.

Specifications

• Powered by GeForce 6800 GPU (NV40)

• 12-pipe GPU Architecture

• 0.13 Micron Process Technology

• High-Speed 256-bit DDR Memory Interface

• Core clock speed of 358 MHz

• Memory clock speed of 770 MHz

• Available with 128mb DDR SDRAM

• AGP 8X interface

• NVIDIA® CineFX™ 3.0 engine

• NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II technology

• NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 3.0 technology

• NVIDIA® High-Precision Dynamic-Range (HPDR) technology

• NVIDIA® ForceWare™ Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)

• NVIDIA® nView™ multi-display technology

• NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0

• 400MHz RAMDACs supports 2048x1536 resolution at 85Hz

• Integrated full MPEG encode and decode support

• Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder up to 1024*768 resolution

• DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5 optimizations and support

What you get

The Chaintech AA6800 Turbo comes in a BIG box.  Inside we found a bunch of goodies that explained its packaging.  In addition to the AA6800 Turbo card, we found a manual; driver CD; bonus software to include WinDVD6, WinDVD Creator, WinRip and Adobe Photoshop Album; a game CD with demo versions of Age of Wonders2, Serious Sam2, Rally Trophy, Max Payne and Tropico.  Thrown in for good measure was the full version of Commandos3.  It didn't end here either; a S-Video cable, composite cable, SV to AV cable, DVI to VGA adapter, power cable and a Q-Ball.  The Q-Ball is the green ball you see below.  Chaintech includes this to give you something to clean your screen so you can appreciate the display eye candy of your new purchase to its fullest.

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Performance Far Cry
Pg 4 - Performance UT2004 / Serious Sam: TSE
Pg 5 - Performance Doom3 and Eye Candy
Pg 6 - Overclocking and Conclusion