Conclusion

ConclusionHey guys and gals... the GeForce 6800 GT is just a magnificent card, but we already knew that didn't we? What the big question here is should be is the following: does PCI-Express make a difference and is it a worthwhile, stable and high performing upgrade right now? My answer would be, yet it does! PCI-Express is all about future products though, right now AGP8x is more than sufficient for the GeForce 6800. There would be only one huge practical advantage, which is HDTV, yet here in Europe we don't have it just yet so it really does not make a difference. But performance wise the AGP8x is more then sufficient for the GT, on PCI Express it will perform almost exactly the same. Why ? Because the bottleneck here would be the actual graphics card and not your AGP 8x or PCI Express slot.

So why should you buy PCI-Express then? Simple, it's the next feature that will become a new standard. Years ago when we moved from PCI towards AGP at first we hardly saw any differences whatsoever performance wise. The same thing we still hear every now and then about the AGP 4x versus 8x discussion. If right now you'd took an AGP 8x product and lowered it to AGP 1x, you'd see the difference in performance and along that line you need to think.

So my recommendation is like this, if you do not plan to upgrade your PC for another year or two then you can stick to AGP 8x products just as well. I mean you will not notice a performance in/decrease at all over the 16x PCI Express products, both are equal.

But... if you plan to upgrade your PC this year, then you should go PCI-Express all the way. Why? Although you will not see a difference, in the future you might buy a new graphics card that does need that exceptional bandwidth PCI Express offers. Next to that, this will be the new standard.

Now, then... since this article was not all about PCI-Express but about the GeForce 6800 GT also... let's step away from PCI Express for now and sum that baby up. As I've stated on the AGP reference version of this product already, the GT is just downright pure fun. You can play any game to date at an extraordinary performance level for an amount of money that seems justified for this product. The 16 full pixel pipelines make sure you will see the biggest performance jump over the previous generation silicon in history and that ensures you some serious gameplay! The heart of the beast has been fitted with an 222 Million transistors silicon doing 350 MHz and yet the card manages to produce numbers that will force you to make noises like hubbabhubba come to poppaa.

The GeForce 6800 GT series justifies it's name, it's the affordable sportcar among the products in the high-end range. Everything about this card simply works, everything is what you expect it to be. This, my friends, simply is a fantastic product.

For your information, we posted additional benchmarks on done on an Athlon 64 3800+ system with the Radeon x800 Pro, XT, GeForce GT and Ultra. http://www.guru3d.com/article/article/136/

Thanks to NVIDIA for sending in this reference sample and Gigabyte for their Intel 915P/E kit.

Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB