Inno3D GeForce 6800

Manufacturer: InnoVision
Supplied by: InnoVision
Estimated Street Price: $299

by Dean Barker  (9/11/2004)

Introduction

It has been run into the ground that NVidia's GeForce 6800 line are the cards to have for great game play in Doom3.  Sure, I like Doom3 but I also like lots of other games.  Even more than that, I like not having to spend a car payment on a video card to play those games.  I think this is the dilemma many of us face when its time for an upgrade.  At present, the prices of the ATi Radeon 9800XT and GeForce 5950 are looking pretty good with new cutting edge products on the market driving their prices down.  Do I want to spend my money on yesterday's killer card or on scaled back version of the bleeding edge of technology?  Today, we are going to look at the vanilla version of NVidia's 6800 line and how it compares to the cutting edge of six months ago.  When all is said and done we hope to show you what is the best choice in the midrange $300 category. 

The GeForce 6800 series comes in three flavors, the 6800, 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra.  The GT and Ultra version both share 16 Pixel Pipeline architecture and killer GDDR3 memory running at 1GHz or more.  The standard 6800 runs off of a 12 Pixel Pipeline design and at a much lower memory speed for its DDR memory.  These two changes effectively put the price of the standard 6800 at a level that is within reach of many of us.  Still, at $300, I want to get my moneys worth so the question returns, do I go with the GeForce 6800, 5950 Ultra or the Radeon 9800XT.  Let's look at Inno3D's venture into these waters and if they have a solution for this quandary.  First off, let's look at the specs of the Inno3D GeForce 6800 that is the focus of this review. 

Specifications

• Powered by GeForce 6800 GPU (NV40)
• Superscalar 12-pipe GPU Architecture
• 0.13 Micron Process Technology
• High-Speed 256-bit DDR Memory Interface with Advanced Memory Control
• Core clock speed of 325 MHz
• Memory clock speed of 700 MHz
• Available in 128 and 256mb models (Review sample is 128)
• Full-Speed 32-Bit Color Precision
• AGP 8X interface
• 12 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
• 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
• Highest DVI output up to 1600x1200 resolution
• 128-bit studio-precision computation
• 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

In addition to a cool box with the Inno3D GeForce 6800, we find several other goodies.  A user manual, DVI to VGA adapter, S-Video line and quite a collection of software.  The expected driver disk, shareware version of 3D Mark 2003, full version of Commandos 3 and demo versions of Lock On, Praetorians, Yagar and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.  All in all, not a bad bundle at all.

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Performance Far Cry
Pg 4 - Performance UT2004 / Doom3
Pg 5 - Performance Serious Sam / Quake3 / Code Creatures
Pg 6 - Eye Candy and Image Quality
Pg 7 - Overclocking and Conclusion

Legal Notice and Fine Print

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