XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition - Page 1

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 12/08/2005 09:00 AM [ ] 0 comment(s)

XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition

Product:	NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS 256MB gDDR3
Manufacturer:	XFX
Information:	XFX Graphics
Street price:	249 USD/EUR

XFX - XXX Edition GeForce 6800 GS Jingle bells, Jingle be... Oh hey, I didn't notice you there .. humiliated laughter .. Hi everyone, Christmas season is here and when you are from the "tech hood" you'll know that Christmas season means silly season (and the "Hood" means a bunch of uber geeks from the hardware industry) ;-0

A couple of weeks ago we reviewed a GeForce 6600 from that wicked company called XFX. One week later NVIDIA however decided to throw in their Christmas release and lifted up the spirit by releasing yet another new graphics card, the GeForce 6800 GS. So since we like XFX so much and since this is going to be a hell-of-a popular graphics card for a lot of people in that Christmas spirit, we just had to take a peek at another GeForce 6800 GS.

Yes indeed, if you checked back on this site two/three weeks ago you'll notice that we already reviewed the 6800 GS from Point of View. This card just had to be reviewed as it's overclocked at default, and I seriously mean overclocked. Today's tested product easily kicks the GeForce 6800 GT performance in the proverbial nuts wise and that means value people !

Labeled with a sales price of roughly 250 EUR/USD for the 256 MB models, there is now this 6800 GS product available in that already very broad range of Series 6 products from NVIDIA. Feature wise it's 100% similar to any GeForce 6800 product and offers really nice performance. Price wise it positions itself right between the 6800 and 6800 GT. That does not sound bad eh ?

When you look at it's architecture the GeForce 6800 GS' graphics core leans more towards the plain 6800 rather than the 6800 GT as the product has a similar amount of pixel-pipelines (12) and also is equipped with 5 vertex processors. Where is that extra performance coming from I hear you ask ? Well there are two explanations for it. Focus on the chart below where I've listed the more relevant (and reference) specifications.

NVIDIA GeForce 6 & 7 Product Lineup Specifications
Product Name	# pixel processors	# vertex processors	Bus width	Memory Type/Amount	GPU Speed	RAM Speed
GeForce 7800 GTX	24	8	256-bit	GDDR3/256MB	430MHz	1200MHz
GeForce 7800 GT	20	7	256-bit	GDDR3/256MB	400MHz	1000MHz
GeForce 6800 Ultra **	16	6	256-bit	GDDR3/256MB	400MHz	1100MHz
GeForce 6800 GT	16	6	256-bit	GDDR3/256MB	350MHz	1000MHz
GeForce 6800 GS	12	5	256-bit	GDDR3/128/256MB	425MHz	1000MHz
GeForce 6800	12	5	256-bit	GDDR/128MB	325MHz	700MHz
GeForce 6800 LE	8	4	256-bit	GDDR/128MB	320MHz	700MHz
GeForce 6600 GT	8	3	128-bit	GDDR3/128/256MB	500MHz	1000MHz
GeForce 6600	8	3	128-bit	GDDR/128MB	300MHz	275(550)
GeForce 6200	4	3	64/128-bit	GDDR/128MB/256MB	300MHz	275(550)

** Not manufactured anymore

As you can see, NVIDIA is doing two rather important things with the new 6800 GS. Firstly they made sure that the core frequency is clocked a good 20-25% faster over the standard 6800. Next to that they have armed the GS with more and faster high-end gDDR3 memory which now runs at a 500 MHz clock frequency (that's effectively 1000 MHz). Can you smell the performance increase already ? Interestingly enough this product might swing towards and over GT performance here and there due to the high framebuffer bandwidth and the higher than GT core frequency.

Today's rabbit in the head is however the default clock frequency of both the core and memory stored in the graphics card BIOS.

Now then, I already explained to you that XFX is overclocking this card at default and not a lame 10 MHz either ! Get this .. 485 MHz for the core and 1.100 MHz on the memory is what you are getting straight out of the box. This card will surely perform better then the 6800 GT, guaranteed ! Let's get acquainted with what we are talking about today and that would be the muscular (yet in a softer feminine way) shaped GeForce 6800 GS.

Next page please .. quickly... hurry hurry !

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