Octopus Overlords

A bit of background - I had an ATI 9800 (non-pro) for a year or so, and loved it. It was a great card, and still is for most things.

Two weeks ago, I impulsively bought an eVGA 6800, vanilla, 128 MB card for $319 after tax at Circuit City. Dumb, and impulsive. It's a good card for sure, but not worth that much, and it's quite crippled it turns out, compared to the GT's and Ultras out there.

Yesterday, Microcenter ran an incredible sale on the 6800 GT, for $319. I was able to return my 6800, and traded up to the GT for $12 (which is what I paid for overnight shipping)

It's not much, but I did run 3dmark 2003 on all 3 cards when I had them, and this might give you an idea of the power difference between them.

System specs:

2.8 Ghz P4 512 mb L2 cache
Abit IS7-e mobo
1 GB Corsair pc3200 (value series)
Audigy 1
Nvidia 66.93 WHQL drivers
DX 9.0c
WinXP SP2

Now for the results:

3DMark 03:

ATI 9800 - 5145

Nvidia 6800 - 8542 (+66%)

Nvidia 6800 GT - 10,505 (+104% over the 9800) (+23% over the 6800)

woohoo!! I was praying for a 10,000, and it exceeded my hopes by 500 pts! i'm VERY happy!

check out some of these readings from the 3dmark runs:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing)

ATI 9800 - 2515.3 MTexels/s

Nvidia 6800 - 3802.0 (+51%)

Nvidia 6800 GT - 5479.5 (+118% over the 9800) (+44% over the 6800)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pixel Shader 2.0

ATI 9800 - 49.6 fps

Nvidia 6800 - 114.5 fps

Nvidia 6800 GT - 151.9 fps
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well as you can see, the GT makes huge leaps over previous cards. I know there's a lot of folks out there with 9800's, who might be wondering if the GT is a worthy upgrade, and I would have to give that a resounding YES.

Thanks for the info. Before the new year I had the strong urge to get a 6800 GT. Instead I have a new iPod so that's out for now. But later in the year I'll definitely check them out again since the 6800 GT series seem to be well regarded video cards.

Anyone know when Nvidia is releasing the next generation of video cards? Perhaps a price drop is "in the cards" (ugh) sometime?

I have the GT overclocked now, to Ultra clocks (405/1100), and it's been perfectly stable for 2 days. I used Nvidia's own overclocking tool, and had it run the test to "find optimal settings" and it suggested 405 and 1100.

I re-ran 3dmark 2003, and ...





A gain of 1300! and the gpu rose a total of 1 degree C (from GT clock temp).

Nice, Jeff. The GT rocks.

Damn, your system specs are almost exactly the same as mine, and I'm running a 9800 Pro. Haven't run 3D mark in a long time, might need to d/l and take a look, as my birthday is this very month. Hmmm....

Those are real nice improvements

Did you try to open the pipes and the extra shader on the 6800? My evga 6800 OC ($250 used on AT) has all it's pipes open and the shader and I get just over 10,000 at stock speeds with a 3.0c, 1 gig corsair value pc3200 (similar to your system).

If your card is loud, you might also look into the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer. I got one because the 2 fans on the 6800 were quite loud even when running at half speed. The Silencer is quieter and my temps went down, too. Only drawback for me was that it didn't fit into my Antec Aria. So, I went to an Antec Sonata (which is much quieter). I originally got the Aria to keep Sage's little fingers from resetting my pc all the time (antec lanboy). The sonata has a lock on it so that takes care of those button pushing fingers.

No, I didn't try to open the extra pipes, and/or OC the 6800. I was considering it, and after googling, the first article I read scared me off ...

This article

which says:

Is it possible to turn on all of the 16 pipelines on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800?

Yes, it is! This is easy: just flash the BIOS from the GeForce 6800 Ultra. After the BIOS re-flash, the graphics processor enables all 16 pixel pipelines and the card becomes… NON-OPERATIONAL!

Why? Because those four missing pipelines hadn’t been disabled just for nothing – they have certain defects, which show themselves as artifacts in 3D applications after you enable those pipelines. You won’t have the opportunity of returning things back easily: after flashing back the BIOS from the 12-pipelined GeForce 6800 you’ll see that the situation remains the same – the card still has 16 pipelines and also has those 3D artifacts. In order to disable the defective pipe-work and restore the card’s operability you will need special software and a specially modified version of the BIOS.

So that scared me off. Not being much of an overclocker, I didn't want to risk it. I've since read of others who have been able to get it done (like yourself) though.

But I feel right now like I got a 6800 Ultra for $319, so I'm very happy with the card. I've run WoW for hours on end at Ultra speeds, and haven't had the first problem.

I bought mine used and was told they were all unlocked without any problems (including snow, distortion, etc.). My card is a bit older as well. I haven't had any problems with it and have had it for about 6 weeks. Overclocking/modding is always a risk and, of course, any processor/video card is going to have different results for different hardware.

Overall, I've always had very good luck with overclocking. The worst I've ever done is hose my windows install. The best I've ever done is get a 50% overclock (celeron 300 to 450).