Its that time again for a major leap in graphics technology. Here is the Geforce 6800 from Nvidia. This card hopes to achieve where the Geforce FX series seemed to fail. Although the FX series was a step forward it wasn't a real leap it was more of a stop gap. The Geforce 6800 boasts a brand new set of features and a special set of performance stats. You have to look quite a way back before you see this type of step forward in the graphics industry. The last real leap of this nature was probably the first introduction of the Geforce 256 to take over from the TNT 2 range. All those years ago the Geforce was the big thing to have. Since then ATI have more than come back into the picture and there Radeon cards have begun to beat them on both image quality and speed.

The first card to be produced in this line is the monster itself the Geforce 6800 Ultra. Other cards will be released later in the year with various cuts in the card and the speed of the chips used. Nvidia say that this card will eradicate all of the problems and niggles that came with the Geforce FX series. That includes the driver problems that Nvidia had to answer for when they were accused of optimizing them for benchmark tests.

Now lets take a look at the basic specs pf the card in comparison to the Geforce FX 5950 and the Radeon 9800 XT, its 2 closest rivals for the top spot.

Card comparison

Looking at the core stats its easy to tell that the main point behind the speed of the Geforce 6800 Ultra is the memory speed and therefore its memory Bandwidth. The core speed is the slowest of the 3 cards. This could mean there is plenty of room for overclocking, however overclocking the core of such a powerful card will probably give negligible results anyway. The other reason is that Nvidia have seen that graphics cards these days are often held back by the memory and not the core chip of the card. There is little point of upping the cost of a card by increasing the speed of the core if its not needed. The memory chips however may come with even faster memory onboard. Even if rated at 550Mhz on your box, have a look at the actual memory chips and you may find that they have 600Mhz rated memory modules onboard. If this is the case you should have no problem overclocking your memory even further to 1.2Ghz DDR.

The Geforce 6800 is a very complex card as its transistor count of 222 Million transistors tells you. By comparison the closest rivals to this graphics card the Geforce FX 5950 and the Radeon 9800 XT only contain about half the transistors each. This could affect the price in the long run as while starting off at the same price as the other top cards did, to lower the price later on will significantly eat into NVIDIA's profits. It could be though that NVIDIA will foot these loses in order to get back to the top of the technology tree.

Cooling and Power

As is a very familiar site these days the new Geforce 6800 come with a very significant looking heatsink fan combination. The fan is fairly noisy as you would expect, although it seems that some sort of driver control slows the fan down after the initial boot up until its required. The rear of the card does not sport any heatsinks as the original reference design for 256Mb cards has all of the memory chips on the front side of the board. However bear in mind that the Geforce 6800 ultra is capable of hosting up to 512Mb of onboard memory. So you may find once manufacturers get hold of the design, that memory chips and heatsinks will begin to appear on the rear of the card. The size of the Geforce 6800 is about the same as the Geforce 5950. So if your upgrading from that card you shouldn't have any problems in that respect. However if you haven't had a card like this before, make sure you have enough room on either side of the card as the heatsink / fan takes up a decent amount of space. Also remembering that a cramped card can get very warm very quickly, so you will need to leave plenty of space for airflow.

The Geforce 6800 does have a rather beefy power requirement. You will need to spare connectors from your PSU as it requires to draw more power than one cable can handle. This gives you some idea of the cards speed. You will need to make sure you also have the right PSU to cope with this requirement especially if you have many other components to think about. Nvidia say you should be looking at about 480W PSU to cope with the Geforce 6800 in a decent sized system.

The Geforce 6800 will be initially released in the AGP 8x format and not the PCI Express 16x format. This is probably because AGP 8x is tried and tested and has no current faults as well as being widely supported by motherboards. As well as the fact that the step up from AGP4x to AGP8x has not made a significant increase in performance as yet so the step up to PCI express 16x is equally not necessary at the current time. 

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