NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

Wednesday September 13, 2006

Written by David Bayon

Tags: NVIDIA | GeForce | 6800 | GT

$599

Price at time of review.

Too expensive for the performance on offer.

NVIDIA

After all this time, the 6800 GT is still a great card for gaming, but it’s starting to look distinctly aged. It has a core clock of 350MHz and 256MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 500MHz.

Although this hardware isn’t up to the task of the latest games at 1280 x 1024 with the maximum settings, it’s certainly no weakling. In Far Cry, we saw a playable 33fps, but Call of Duty 2 returned 21fps. Switch off HDR in the former or lower the textures in the latter, though, and you’ll get smooth frame rates.

However, there’s an important blip on the 6800 GT’s radar, and it comes in the form of the 7600 GT. This was about 5fps faster in Far Cry and Call of Duty 2, while Inno3D’s version (see below) costs $319 less in the process.

In its favour, the 6800 GT we tested from Asus has two DVI outputs (one single-link and one dual-link), comes with Joint Operations and also lights up bright blue.

However, the Inno3D 7600 GT sports dual DVI interfaces plus component output — a feature the Asus lacks. Overall, the blue LEDs and free game aren’t enough to ward off the 7600 GT, which is clearly far better value.

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This article appeared in the August 2006 issue of PC Authority.

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