XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition

 

As you have been able to observe, our review sample today comes XFX. The GS is already available in stores and XFX is offering you a fantastic deal .. a box filled with good stuff. The software bundle is just great as you receive two full games - pretty hot ones also which are worth 80 bucks alone.

• Far Cry Full Game
• Call of Duty 2 Full Game
• Driver CD with a set of tools
• S-Video Cable
• DVI to VGA Adaptor
• 6-pin PSU power connector
• Manual

There's nothing much to be said here other then it's a very complete bundle and has two really nice games included. The card itself seems to be 100% NVIDIA reference based except for the cooling shim but we'll show you that and even more in our photo-shoot.

When you are buying the XFX 6800 GS then please be aware of the fact that there are two models. The "Extreme Edition" which has a standard smaller (450 core) overclock, and the "XXX edition" we test today, with the default high (485 core) clock settings.

Power Supply Requirements

Now here's where we are going to surprise you a little bit more. Power consumption is really not bad ! Of course the GeForce 6800 GS requires a stable 12-volt power source for best performance and reliability, and most of all that gaming experience of yours. Many PC power supplies dedicate most of their 12-volt power to the power rail that goes to the CPU, rather than the peripheral connectors. Many power supplies also do not provide ample overload protection to protect system components such as motherboards and graphics cards.

For a SINGLE GeForce 6800 GS graphics card, NVIDIA recommends a 350 watt power supply. For DUAL SLI GeForce 6800 GS graphics configurations, NVIDIA recommends a 420 watt power supply.

So NVIDIA is recommending nothing too dramatic in terms of a power supply unit. Let's test that...

Excuse Me Sir, but Watt Did You Say?


With the ongoing trend in an increased power consumption we will check the statement that NVIDIA made about power consumption in. We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify those claims. The graphics card consumes roughly 75 Watts at peak during 3D gaming, this is also the reason why we see a 6-pin power connector on the card. Your PCI-Express 16x bus can deliver only 75 Watts to a graphics card. I never understood power requirement decision making as half a year after its release PCI-Express graphics cards were already consuming more power than the slot could provide.

Of course we do what we always do with new graphics' cards, we monitored the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU.

In 3DMark the PC shows a maximum peak use of 250 Watt. Now you know why 300 Watt Power Supplies are not sufficient anymore these days, you need 350 at the least. We have confirmed NVIDIA's statement.

The temperature remains well within the safety margins. The standard reference cooling design works really efficiently.

At idle, normal operation, expect roughly 40-45 Degrees C. At 100% graphics core utilization we measured a maximum 65 Degrees C peak temperature, which is actually becoming the norm. Two years ago I would have freaked out though. Speaking of cooling and thus ventilation, the cooling fan at 100% utilization does not make a lot of noise at all, in fact the HD is producing way more noise then the reference cooler on this NVIDIA graphics card and that's very nice to observe.

The bigger two slot exhaust coolers we see on a lot of cards these days actually do have my preference as single slot coolers tend to dump that heat inside your PC, where as the dual slot coolers are designed to dump that heat outside the PC. As always, make sure your PC is well ventilated.

The three game-demo's from 3DMark05 clearly show the temperature peak