GeForce 6800 GT PCI Express - A sporty introduction

Product: GeForce 6800 GT - PCI Express
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
MSRP: 399 USD
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB

Finally here it is, the GeForce 6800 GT review we've been promising you for weeks now. Man, did I have my bit of bad luck with this article. Let me explain to you, a few weeks ago I received an email from NVIDIA asking if we'd like to do an article on a PCI-Express card from NVIDIA. Not knowing that it was the Geforce 6800 GT I contacted a few mainboard manufacturers to see if they had something ready for us to use to test the video card.

Albatron and Gigabyte where among the first to ship out a mainboard to us. Albatron was the first and Gigabyte had a complete review kit for us including CPU and DDR2 memory. One day before shipping however Gigabyte realized this was the only kit available for Europe, they had a Seminar coming up and they wanted to show off some goods. Due to that we were delayed for two weeks before the kit came in. Now then... the videocard arrives... cool stuff, pretty exciting. But hey that's not a Molex power connector... what's that new power-connector on the 6800? That surely requires a specific cable. And yes, NVIDIA forgot to ship the new 6-pin power cable for the videocard resulting in another week delay before the cable actually arrived.

Meanwhile I prepped the Albatron mainboard with a new Socket 775 Pentium 4. Eureka... one week ago we were ready to roll as we had everything complete. So I assembled the PC, start up the rig and beep... the BIOS was posting. 2 seconds later... OMG the system shut's down all by itself. At that point the guru in me started to wonder if we had been cursed or something, of course it did not end there. I spent the afternoon trying to figure out what was the issue with that rig. Replacing memory, PSU, etc... the entire enchilada. Fact is, I wasn't even able to enter the BIOS before the PC shut down. Then it hit me... this mainboard had the new 915p/g chipset from Intel. You know, the one with the recalled buggy Southbridge, that's right... the mainboard had the ICH6R bug, the mainboard came from a series that Intel recalled.

So since we had a sample from another manufacturer, we went back to the Gigabyte mainboard then, they sent out this really nice kit, yet forgot to ship the CPU cooler (new socket 775 design). Luckily one day later I received a CPU kit from Intel, which has a cooler included. I install that mainboard into the PC and start equipping it with memory etc, when I remove a CPU retention clip what do you think happened... I noticed that the CPU socket was actually damaged one of the pins was somewhat bent out of position. After carefully bending it back and firing up the system it consistently kept crashing ..

At that time I was ready to open up the window and throw every component out of the window, yep it was that frustrating. I decided to give it one more try, I refitted the defective pin under a magnifying glass with the help of a pincet and eureka, we finally had a live and stable system...

OMG!

Right ladies and gentlemen, we are finally able to do a PCI-Express review. Today's article, as you can guess, will be all about NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT on the new PCI-Express 16x bus. It has twice the bandwidth and sounds very promising, let's get acquainted with what we are talking about today and that would be the sporty named GeForce 6800 GT; which I believe is the best product in terms of bang for your bucks in the high-end graphics arena.

GeForce 6800 GT - PCI-Express