Conclusion
ConclusionAfter many hours of... well fun, I just can't help myself over it, this videocard is lethal! See it's simple... performance equals your money... performance in this case is really close towards the 6
800 Ultra, yet the 6800GT has several advantages over that more expensive product.
On the outside things look really well as there has been a bit of dental work done to make it look more eye-catching. First off, NVIDIA stripped off one Molex connector. Secondly, this is a single slot design card. It will save you a PCI slot. Thirdly, it's 100 USD bucks cheaper which makes it a very attractive buy in the high-end range. Fourth is cooling, the single slot solution is not only looking great, it's cooling is great and most of, noise wise, all you'll hear is a smooth civilized hum as you can expect from any decent graphics card.
Next to that, the GeForce 6800 offers a huge performance bump over the previous generations of graphics silicon. At the heart of the beast we find 222 Million transistors running at 350 MHz and yet the card manages to produce numbers that will force you to make noises like guuuaaahh. The combination of the new 61.34 drivers also really helped here. It's quite clear that NVIDIA still can tweak some more 'juice' out of the 6800 series and that makes sense, new silicon requires some fine tuning and eventually this product will get even faster as that is the track record for NVIDIA.
You can't really think about spending 400 bucks on a competing Radeon x800 pro without at least considering the equal priced GeForce 6800 GT as this product is very VERY fast. And hey, there already have been some reports on 300 USD deals for the GT.
Where the GeForce FX series was a bit sober, this is raw and nice. This feels like it was designed from day one to be the "sports car" among graphics cards. Let me state it this way, if you plan to buy a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra at 350-380 USD in the next weeks instead of the GeForce 6800 GT then I will personally choke you to death (Editor: and I will beat you to death with a floppy cable). Wait a few weeks on availability and go for the 6800 GT, comprende amigo?
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At this timeframe in 2004 the Geforce 6800 GT is a nearly perfect and exciting product in my eyes, with its sporty name it's quite affordable for a product in the high-end range and offers you any available graphics technology you need for your games to run at high image quality at a tremendous speed. Feature-wise it's a cocktail, a blend of the best technology available. The idea behind the product was to make an affordable, high-performing graphics card with the means to annihilate everything in its path and NVIDIA... did just that. There's a sense of well... completeness of a cycle.
Everything about this card simple works, everything is what you expect it to be. This is an ideal card for the enthusiast gamer who needs to relax and chill after a hard days work or local fragfest. Mind you that the owner of this particular card is not getting it back, sorry NVIDIA it's your punishment for a too nice product. So far I can only find one thing wrong with it... it eats away my free time with all the games. This guru's, is a great graphics card.
If you like to chat a little about the new product(s), then by all means do do in our NVIDIA forums.
- Update - 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/
Cheapest on-line price for the GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
