Best 6800GT?

.ak

What's the best 6800GT on the market at the moment? I'm planning on buying a 6800GT and softmoding it to an Ultra.

First comes preformance, second comes looks - I've got a huge window on my case, with a blue cathod/led theme, I'd rather not have something gawdish in my case.. But I'll sacrafice it for preformance ofcourse


-Adam

P.S: I'm not concerned with the price.

Nietzschean

.ak wrote:

What's the best 6800GT on the market at the moment? I'm planning on buying a 6800GT and softmoding it to an Ultra.

First comes preformance, second comes looks - I've got a huge window on my case, with a blue cathod/led theme, I'd rather not have something gawdish in my case.. But I'll sacrafice it for preformance ofcourse


-Adam

P.S: I'm not concerned with the price.

well i've the leadtek 6800GT OEM, the retail version has a bigger heatsink + cooler tho don't seem to need it i can clock mine 440/1150 no bother....

as for softmodding it to an ultra, thats had mixed results personally it made my card unstable at anything over 400, so proformance went down the tubes....

isn't it the asus one that has the fancy lcd toy's........


if money ain't an issue get one with an artic rev 4 cooler on it.......(if not, get another one and then replace the cooler with that one..)

.ak

Only prob with the Asus one is they don't have a GT yet. Only Ultra. I might just go with the ultra and save myself the hassle.

koneko

The Galaxy Glacier looks cool in a windowed case, and it has better RAM (supposedly). You can get it at www.over-clock.co.uk and possibly www.overclock.co.uk when they have stock again (I think Tekheads.co.uk might have them aswell).

Whatever you do, don't order from overclockers.co.uk ... Seriously

Zakalwe

I ordered the Galaxy Glacier too (Hi Koneko!). It also comes with a core clock of 370 as apposed to the reference design of 350. I'm hoping mine will arrive today or tomorrow. I ordered from http://www.over-clock.co.uk. I have had no problems reaching them on the phone and the woman on the other end, Sue, was extremely helpful.

I'll review it on this forum the first chance I get. After currency conversion and with shipping it came to about €480. I've held off playing any more of Doom III until I get this card installed. Can't wait

koneko

Hehe yeah Sue is great, she even knows who I am when I ring before I tell her
Highly recommend them, great customer service.

I'm exactly the same Zakalwe, I'm about half way through and I'm just waiting for the card now.

Zakalwe

I was at home today for lunch and to pick up some stuff and guess what arrived? My 6800 GT!

The parcel was in perfect condition and wrapped in bubble wrap. The actual box is quite impressive in that it's a hard black case about 2" x 12" x 18". Inside is the card itself, 2 games, Chaser - a FPS and some motocross rally game, a VIVO cable, a driver disk and a blanking plate with holes for the cooler exhaust.

The card itself is quite a beast. It's probably 10" long and takes up the neighboring PCI slot. Cooling is provided by the Artic Cooler Revision 4. The RAM and GPU are both covered by a single continuous plate of copper about 3mm thick. This is then attached to the aluminum fins of the cooler in its "wind tunnel". The fan actually runs very quietly. I am very impressed with the performance of this cooler so far compared to the complaints of jet engine like volumes from other cards I've read of in reviews.

I installed the latest detonator drivers, coolbitsed the reg to enable the overclocking and opened up the detonator control panel. Nvidia's test recommended an overclock of 415/1080 to start off with. Not bad at all! The RAM will probably go to 1.1Ghz easily.

I loaded up Doom III, and set the graphics as follows.

1280x1024 High Quality.
All advanced options turned on
2x AA

My config is not hacked to use inferior mipmapping such as GL_NEAREST and I have anisotropic filtering still enabled. I have also enabled muzzle flashes which gives a performance hit but looks nice. The only tweaks are for the image caches for smoothness.

The second run of timedemo demo1 gave me 45fps. Not too shabby at all! Doom III looked absolutely spectacular. I had to head back to work so I couldn't do any more tweaking or try out other games such as FarCry

My other relevant specs are

Athlon 64 3200+
1GB of Adata Vitesta RAM
160GB Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 SATA HDD
MSI K8N Neo Platinum


I bet Koneko's going mad to get home and see if there's a package waiting for her now

Let me know your timedemo results and your setup when you get installed (if you can tear yourself away from gaming for long enough that is)

koneko

Lol, nah mine won't get here till tomorrow (some fairly heavy stuff was shipping at the same time and my order was delayed because of bloody overclockers.co.uk again and failing to give me my refund).

Venom

If your going to go for an Asus 6800 based card, do note that in all tests the Asus has preformed the worst of the 6800's and the cool led fan is ment to be very noisey.

Personaly Im gonna go for a gainward ultra card.

astrofool

was gonna go for an asus before I heard that

Whats the best ultra about then, temp/noise wise ?

.ak

Zakalwe, which 9800GT did you get?

I heard the Galaxy Glacier is good, but it only uses the artic cooler on it.. which does NOT cool the RAM. Peats stock the Galaxy Glaciers, but I'm not sure if I should get one if I'm gonna overclock it to ultraspeeds... Any news on that?

Zakalwe

I got the Galaxy Glacier. It DOES cool the RAM. The copper block is thermal pasted to the RAM chips and the GPU. This card uses the VGA Silencer version 4.

The VGA Silencer and the VGA Cooler revision 3 and under that Artic made for the 9800 Pro cards doesn't cool the RAM.

I have a VGA Cooler 3 on a 9800 Pro and it doesn't cool the RAM.
The cooler on my 6800 GT defintely does though and it does a fine job too!

Stormfox1020

Heh a 9800GT, god damn wouldnt mind one of those :rolleyes:

Zakalwe

I forgot to mention that my card runs fine at Ultra speeds. In fact I'm running it above Ultra speeds at the moment without any "snow". I don't know the limits of this card because I have yet to hit them!

I ran the timedemos with vsync on (whoops!). The actual in game framerate is normally above 60fps

koneko

Got my card, Doom 3 runs hella-sweet. How fancy is the box that card came in?

I get the feeling my card won't clock as well (if the Nvidia recommendation is anything to go by) but I haven't had a chance to test that yet.

Ran Farcry aswell, turned up anti-aliasing, looked great. Looking forward to overclocking my system and the card.

.ak

Which 6800 is dat then koneko?

.ak

koneko

Well, as mentioned previously in the thread , the Galaxy Glacier one.

Zakalwe

I've spent time tweaking games only to realise that I can just turn everything on full at 1600x1200 and they'll still run at full speed.

In older games like Day of Defeat fraps never stops displaying the monitors refresh rate ( with vsync on of course ). I get a constant 75 frames a second at 1600x1200 with max AA and AF and High Quality.

I was playing Need for Speed Underground last night and turned everything up full at the highest resolution and even with motion blur and all other effects the framerate stays over 60.

This card is just simply amazing.

Azza

You guys are tempting me now. How much did you lot pay for the 6800GTs. I'm in quite a bind don't know what to do. I play more open GL games than Direct X and I want to use linux more so it makes sense to go for the Nvidia cards but then again an X800XT would be better overall but there is no sign of those cards.

Zakalwe

With delivery it worked out at about €480.

I always laugh at benchmarks like those. OMG the X9000GTXT Pro Extreme Golden Sample gets 390 fps and the FX3BFG9000 Ultra only gets 388!!!!!!!!

Xithus

I picked up the galaxy card today. I have it running at ultra speeds fine (400/1100) Im hoping it'll do more

Mine cost me €509, pricey but I wanted it today!

Stormfox1020

Omg! E510, thats uber bucks, but then again the 2 week agony of waiting for the card to come is worth the extra E30. Am going to include the 6800GT in my new system. /me cant wait to play Doom 3 in 1600x1280 w/Ultra settings.

Azza

Where you guys getting all your stuff?

Xithus

yea its worth the extra 30 to get it today. I could have waited and got a gigabyte 6800gt for about €460 though, Im hopin I wont regret my choice. I got mine in peats, we got 4 in and I wanted one .!!! Arghhh! lookin forward to the 6800gt race tomorrow .ak ?

lower scores are better btw

koneko

I got mine at www.over-clock.co.uk, highly recommend them, they're really friendly and fast.

Mine's running at Ultra speeds now aswell, don't know how much higher the memory will go but the core clock seems like it can take a bit more so I'll play around with that later. Very nice card.