NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT Review

With street prices of retail boards already listed at lower than £300, this new 6800 part is set to heat things up for the ATi X800 Pro. To pile on the pressure, the GeForce GT has one key architectural advantage – it’s a full 16-pipeline card, compared to the X800 Pro’s 12 pipelines. The only differences to its bigger brother are lower clock speeds, with 350MHz for the GPU and 1,000MHz effective for the 256MB of memory. This gives it the edge over the X800 Pro on paper but as they say battles aren’t won on paper. Ladies and gentleman, I think we have a fight on our hands.

Judging from our results, if you like to run games with image enhancing features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, nVidia has a winner on its hands. At the same time though, it’s clear that the 12-pipeline X800 Pro isn’t the card that ATi would have chosen to compare against the 6800 GT. If nVidia can get the 6800 GT out of the door quickly then it is likely to force ATi to drop the price of the X800 Pro, which is good news for gamers seeing as it’s still an impressive card. We can therefore expect ATi to release a lower clocked version of its 16-pipeline X800 XT Platinum Edition to match the 6800 GT.

As things stand at the moment though cards based on the nVidia 6800 GT should shape up to be the best choice for those who are looking for high-end performance but still want to keep to some sort of budget.

nVidia GeForce 6800 GT @ Trusted Reviews