nVidia GeForce 6800 (1 Viewer)

[Adam Sanchez]

Hey all. I am in the market to do something I thought I would never do, buy a top of the line video card and spend like $400 on it!

A few questions:

What is the difference between all the Geforce 6800 cards? The LE, The Ultra, Se, and whatever else they got out there?

What is a really good video card making brand, for nVidia cards specifically. I have never really known a good video card company. I use to always just buy whatever had the shipset I wanted and whatever was in my budget.

Thanks!

 

[Mike Fassler]

if you get a 6800 get a GT it'll be the best bang for the buck
and its not all that much slower than the ultra. BFG makes the best nvidia cards currently, along with ASUS,and Gainward.

 

[Max Leung]

I'd be a bit wary of the Asus cards - first of all some of their cards have a nice GPU, ie. a 6800GT, paired with horrible RAM, like 128bit chips. Careful! Also, they use a proprietary driver to control the fan speed - and I find it very very flaky - it will work for a while, and then suddenly for no reason the fan will hit maximum speeds even if you tell it to run at a slower speed at a given temperature. Terrible implementation. Also, this driver can steals CPU cycles causing some stuttering in video playback.

Gainward I think uses a proprietary driver for fan control too...I don't know if it works better than the Asus one.

eVGA makes the reference cards for NVIDIA that are sent to hardware reviewers. I'd recommend eVGA if you want maximum compatibility. XFX is also a good buy as they like to provide dual-DVI even for their lower-end cards such as the 6600GTs.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I had been researching and had realized a GT 6800 was the way to go. No reason to pay like $100 more for what most tests I saw eqauled out to 2-3 more frames a second.

So Gainward is a good one huh? Funny I had come to the thought myself that they were kind of low end. I bought a card of thiers once, I believe it was a 5700 FX but returned it. My current card is an Albratron Geforce FX 5700 256 Meg card and I like it. I was looking on newegg and thier 256 Meg 6800 GT has gottem some favorable reviews. How would you all rate Albatron?

Right now I think the brands Im considering most are Albatron, XFX, eVGA and... I suppose Gainward.

-ADam

 

[BrianShort]

I just bought a XFX 6600GT from Newegg (along with the rest of a new computer). It came pretty well recommended at Anandtech.

Brian

 

[Adam Sanchez]

I was just talking to a friend tonight and I was very surprised to hear him say ATI is getting alot better. he said he has seen the same game, world of warcraft, on both cards from Nvidia and ATI of simular quality and that the ATI looked brighter and richer.

Great now I have something new to think about. Just out of curiousity, what is ATI's equvalent of the Nvidia 6800 GT I have in mind?

I would like opinions on what you prefer, ATIs top or Nvidia's top. I want the best card I can get, I don't wanna be buying another video card til I buy a whole new computer in 3-4 years.

 

[DaveB]

ATI cards are also of excellent quality, especially with D3D apps (although OGL continues to lag a bit behind Nvidia), but as was stated the 6800GT is probably the best bang/buck at the high end of the current crop (again, largely due to superior OGL implementation).

Sorry for the run-on.

David

 

[Adam Sanchez]

OGL? What is that?

 

[Sami Kallio]

ATI was the King of video cards for a long time. Just now has NVidia catched up and their mid-range cards are better than ATI's. ATI still has the card to beat in terms of performance but it comes with a big price tag too.

6600GT probably is the best bang for the buck at the moment. I replaced my 9800Pro/XT card with one. I think I need to rollback to older drivers as I am seeing quite a lot of artifacts I never saw with the ATI. It's a lot faster though but ATI has always had better drivers in my experience (artifacts).

 

[Adam Sanchez]

If I get a nVidia, it will be at 6800 GT, that much I'm sure of.

I was looking at ATI's X800 (XL I think) that just came out that is like thier direct competitor for the above card, but cheaper. But best I can tell, it's only in PCI Express and I am limited to AGP and some reviews said that if that's the case, the 6800 May be my best bet.

I have just always prefered nVidia... it works with whatever games I've ever owned and I had learned at least in my case that nVidia was better for games while ATI fared better for multimedia. There was a article on Anandtech about Nvidia recently enabled some feature called Pure Video. Is that a really big deal?

If I get nVidia, I stll have to choose the brand. I will say one thing I love about ATI is they make thier own cards. Maybe that doesn't matter much, but I like it.

Oh and still wondering about Albatron's quality of cards.

 

[Sami Kallio]

I got the 6600GT because I wanted to experiment with Pure Video. Then I read that you need drivers 71.03 and up (and Nvidia DVD software, not free). NVidia only has drivers from more than a month ago and you will need to download beta drivers from 3rd party...

If you have NVidia card and have always used NVidia website for drivers, check out http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ for updated drivers.

 

[Max Leung]

I use the 67.03 (and just tried the 67.66) drivers for my 6800GT. When NVIDIA launched PureVideo a few weeks ago, they linked to the 67.03 drivers. I would recommend sticking with those for now. It works well with 67.03 it seems. The 67.66 drivers caused a couple of menu items in the World of Warcraft settings menu to be missing...weird. Could just be me.

For DVD playback, the NVIDIA DVD decoders (30 day trial) and the 67.03 drivers give very good playback quality. People in the HTPC forum at avsforum.com think they beat ATI. However, I do have an issue with improper HDTV vertical refresh rate output from the NVIDIA video cards.

 

[Sami Kallio]

I downloaded 71.24 drivers and now the artifacts are gone. At least the most obvious ones. I was using the latest NVidia release which is 66.93. overclocked core and memory a little and 3DMark05 score jumped from 3106 to 3301. Much better than the 9800Pro with XT core would do.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

opengl.

CJ