Octopus Overlords

I finally removed my trusty XFX GF4-ti4200 and installed my new eVGA 6800GT this past weekend, so I thought I'd post some quick impressions for other folks who may be contemplating a similar upgrade:

- The card is very long. I had to move my secondary HD to a different spot in the HD cage for this card to fit and have room to plug the power connector in the back. Even then, if the card were any longer it would not have fit in my mid-tower case without removing the secondary HD completely. There is very little clearance between the back end of the card and the back end of my HDs. This is my case.

Since I had to take out the HD cage, I added a spare case fan to the fitting at the front of the HD cage to add some more air flow over my 2 HDs and the 6800GT behind them. I attached the new fan to one of the regulated "fan only" connectors of my Antec True430 PSU so that it wouldn't add too much noise. So thanks to the new fan, my case temps are actually now 1-2 degrees cooler (down to 32-ish) with the 6800GT than they were with my ti4200. The 6800GT itself is idling at about 52, which seems fine. I haven't checked it under load yet.

I also had to rearrange my power cables a bit to give the 6800GT a line all to itself. Anyway, I wanted to note the need to move around HDs, etc so that others who may be getting a 6800 series card will know that it may take a little longer to install if you need to do some rearranging of more than just a power cable.

- The card seems very fast. I did some quick default, untweaked benchmarks to make sure everything was working:

Before, with my ti4200 128MB: 11,472 in 3dmark01 and 1,487 in 3dmark03
After, with my 6800GT 256MB: 14,908 in 3dmark01 and... 10,140 in 3dmark03!

At first, I was concerned that the 3dmark01 score did not increase much, but the massive increase in 3dmark03 leads me to believe all is well and functioning properly. I'm not a big benchmark guy, but apparently the older 3dmark01 just doesn't stress the cards enough to show the performance gap between the 4200 and the 6800 (esp. since it doesn't cover the DX9 stuff featured by 3dmark03).

So far, I have just run Doom 3 (came with the card) and all seemed very smooth (and dark, heh) with no problems. I'll have to run a timedemo and do some fps checks to confirm that the card is doing what it should. Next up when I get a chance will be Half-Life 2 and Far Cry. For now, I'm using the 66.93 WHQL drivers from Nvidia.

So my current rig:

P4 2.66 GHz, 533 MHz FSB
Intel D845PEBT2 mobo (AGP 4x but works fine with the 8x cards)
1 GB PC2700 RAM
eVGA 6800GT
Audigy 2 ZS with Logitech z-340 2.1 speakers
2 Maxtor 80G HD
Liteon DVD/CDRW

I should be happy for a while, which is good since the next performance upgrade would be the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta. Now I am ready to enjoy DX9 games in their full glory!

Your 3DMark2001SE score did not go up much because it is an older benchmark and is not much of a challenge for a modern video card, so it is limited by your CPU for the most part. I went from 18xxx to 19xxx when I upgraded to a 6800GT, but my 3DMark2003 score jumped up to 12,000 so I knew that it was working fine...

Glad it's working out for ya Freezer. Luckily that Newegg Pon Farr came and went so I don't have that murderous urge to buy the 6800GT. But I think after Christmas I'll probably pick one up which I think is a more sensible time to do it.

Anyone know of any rumored price drops?

PS Go download HL2 now! NOW!

I went from a 9600 NP to a 6800 OC (which I unlocked the extra pipes and shader in) and went from about 3000 to just over 10,000 in 3dmark03. If I could ever get my aria to cool decently, I' could get that up a bit more with some overclocking. Aria's and P4's don't seem to mix well.

Cool, sounds like my 10K+ 3dmark03 score is about right. Everything seems to be working great so far.

Last night I installed and played through the tutorial of KOTOR. (The combat was a little confusing so I need to read back through the manual.) Then I tried out 4xAA for the first time. Nice!

Silj, I haven't heard of any price drops. I am guessing that the Nvidia price schedule will probably sit for a while at approx. 6600 GT $199, 6800 $299, and 6800GT $399, give or take $10-15 at newegg. The best bet for a good price any time in the near future is probably looking for a $50 rebate or somesuch deal at Best Buy or CompUSA. Just a guess though. I don't have any hard info to back that up.

Those Aria cases are pretty sweet looking, EvilHomer. I'm amazed the 6800 actually fit in there. Too bad on the cooling--sounds like you'd probably have to refit your 6800 with a different cooler/heatsink (eVGA has a copper heatsink upgrade available) if you wanted to push it further.

I'd like to build a little box like that with a flat panel monitor as a Win98 gaming box so I can set up a small second rig to play the few games that will just not run on XP (Mechwarrior Titanium Trilogy, I'm looking at you). I'm wondering if the slowest mobo/cpu combo you could get for a small-size case would still be too fast for something like the MW2 trilogy...hmmm.

Silj, I'm downloading Steam tonight! I'm praying to the anti-stutter gods as we speak.

Freezer-TPF- wrote:Silj, I'm downloading Steam tonight! I'm praying to the anti-stutter gods as we speak.

Good luck. I don't know what hardware/driver config brings on the stutter bug. I know that I ran into some stuttering very infrequently and it didn't impact my gameplay very much. Alot of my settings were turned up and I'm running with a 5900FX card, drivers in the 66.00 series, same soundcard as you, DX9.0c.

How much difference should there be between these cards in 3dmark2003? A 6800oc is in the 10,000's, a 6800gt is in the 10,000's and I have a 6800 ultra oc and am getting in the high 12,000's. Should they be this close together? Or is there perhaps a bottleneck limiting the numbers? I am running a 2.8 p4 overclocked to 3.3 with 1gb of ram.

Oh, and by the way, with a bit of effort you can get these cards at reduced prices. I have seen the GT's recently for $349 and I got my Ultra OC for the retail price of a GT. In fact Bestbuy has a 10% off coupon this weekend for "select customers" that increases to 12% if you are a rewardzone member- plus if you are a rewardzone memeber you would qualify for at least a $10 certificate if you bought a GT. So this weekend at Bestbuy you could get a GT for ~$350 and get a $10 rewards certificate- bringing it to a grand total of ~$340, plus tax.

gorham09 wrote:How much difference should there be between these cards in 3dmark2003? A 6800oc is in the 10,000's, a 6800gt is in the 10,000's and I have a 6800 ultra oc and am getting in the high 12,000's. Should they be this close together? Or is there perhaps a bottleneck limiting the numbers? I am running a 2.8 p4 overclocked to 3.3 with 1gb of ram.

I only have a P4 2.66 (533 MHz FSB) and 1 GB PC2700 RAM with my 6800GT, so that probably accounts for some difference (or lack thereof). Also, on most gaming benchmarks I have seen, the 6800 and 6800GT are usually pretty close FPS-wise when running at something like 1024x768 with no AA or AF, which I think is also how I ran the 3Dmark03 benchmark (whatever the vanilla settings are). The 6800GT doesn't pull away from the 6800 in those tests until you start cranking up the resolution and AA/AF. When you do that, the 6800 takes a bigger performance hit than the GT, if I recall correctly.

And that's a good tip on the BB stuff. The 10% coupons are pretty good if you are gunning for a $300/400 video card.