Inno3D GeForce 6800

Overclocking

Using Coolbits to add in the clock frequency option, we were able to find a stable max overclock of 367MHz on the core and 784MHz on the memory.  What I found as quite surprising was that we didn't get any gains in frame rates more than a frame or two from our overclock.  I can only speculate that the 12 Pixel Pipeline is holding the vanilla 6800 back from its GT and Ultra siblings.

Conclusion

Inno3D has done a great job bringing NVidia's entry level high end card to market.  For the littlest of the 6800 line to go toe to toe with the likes of a Radeon 9800XT and the GeForce 5950 Ultra speaks volumes for the raw horsepower of the GeForce 6800.  Keep in mind that this is a 128mb card whereas the comparison cards were both packing 256megs of memory.  The only two benches that brought the 6800 at or below the 30fps mark (this is where your eyes will begin to detect lag) was at 1600 resolution with the quality settings in Far Cry.  If you're a big UT2004 or Doom3 player, you can see that the Inno3D card here rocks.

Image quality was excellent.  The pics we had shown earlier were (from left to right) 5950 Ultra, Inno3D GeForce 6800 and Radeon 9800XT.  At this level of performance, it takes someone with a discriminating eye far beyond the normal Joe to see a difference.

I think our benches answered our question we opened this review with.  With the prices of the 9800XT and 5950 Ultra dropping into the $300 range they just can't compete with the similarly priced (if not lesser expensive) GeForce 6800.  The vanilla card from Inno3D had a solid software bundle but nothing extravagant.  This lack of extravagancies make the Inno3D card seem pretty bland but it is this lack of extravagancies that keeps the price down.  The GT version is going to run about $100 more than the standard version while the Ultra model is going to tack on roughly $200 more.  All things considered, the GeForce 6800 is the card to have unless you're related to Donald Trump.  Great performance, excellent image quality, not overly expensive and let's not forget the hallmark of the 6800 cards, they rock Doom3 like nothing else.  Thanks to the folks at Inno3D for giving us a chance to play with what I think will be equivalent of what the FX5900 card was to the last generation of VGA products.  I would expect to see the Inno3D GeForce 6800 be available this month en mass.

Pros

• Very fast

• Price to performance ratio fantastic

• Excellent image quality

• Quiet operation

• It's got the NVidia mermaid babe on it

Cons

• Availability specifics unknown at present

BACK                    HOME

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

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