by Josh Walrath

Conclusion

     I am very, very impressed with the GeForce 6800 GPU, and Chaintech’s implementation is truly second to none. At the price of many other vanilla GeForce 6800's, Chaintech has delivered a product that is faster out of the box (10% overclock), along with some very useful extras in the box. Not only that, but after emptying the box, you can use it as a briefcase! Pretty clever!

Yet another angry person on the box, but at least this guy is telling you the clock speeds that this particular model comes in.

     In all seriousness, this is a very capable card at the $300 price point. The only let down at this price is that the card only features 128 MB of memory. When even value boards feature 256 MB layouts with DDR of similar speed, it is hard to understand why NVIDIA and its partners didn’t agree to take a small hit in margins and outfit this board with 256 MB of 350 MHz DDR-1 (which is in great supply). I would estimate that it would add around $19 to the card’s overall price, but I think that would be money well spent. Now that we have Doom 3 out in the wild, and Half Life 2 about ready to be released, video cards need more onboard memory than ever before. This is not even considering future titles utilizing those engines that could in fact push requirements up even further! For a person willing to spend $300 for a video card, and hoping that it will last them two years, they may be in a big surprise when they can’t play several games in the future at high quality settings because they only have 128 MB of memory.

     Overall image quality is excellent, and even though the filtering algorithm is not as complex or as clean as that used in the FX 5x00 series, it gets the job done and has about the same quality as ATI’s filtering. The ability to enable or disable the trilinear and anistotropic optimizations is a great step forward for NVIDIA, as many users want to be able to control their card's output and not have these decisions forced upon them by the manufacturers. If I don’t mind taking a 5% hit in framerates to get outstanding image quality, then I should be able to make that decision on my own! I think many other users agree with me here also.

While this is not a great picture of the card, note how long it is, even in the spacious Antec Performance Plus 1080.  A hard drive would have a hard time squeezing in at the same level as this card.

     From a technology standpoint the NV40 GPU is an outstanding product. It is fast, it is efficient, and it produces some outstanding visuals at great framerates. I was surprised by how much faster overall this card was than the 9800XT that I compared it to. The 9800XT is running at 412 MHz, and it has some very mature drivers behind it. The 6800 is still very new to NVIDIA, and a lot of further driver optimizations are expected. It is very nice to see NVIDIA back in the game, as the marketplace needed a lot more competition.

     Overall I have very few problems recommending this card to most users. Even though the 128 MB memory load is not as big as I would have liked, I found that I had no problems in any of the games I have played. Doom 3 may be pushing it a bit, but it still seems to hold up well under the load. I imagine going to Ultra quality on that title would make the card pretty choppy though. Still, there is a lot of video card there for $305, and with the ability to support SM 3.0, it should have enough legs to last a user for the next two years without a problem.

     If Chaintech had outfitted this card with 256 MB of memory, and had some better filtering on its VGA output, it would have achieved a very high score. Even as it stands, this is still an excellent card for the money.

Chaintech GeForce AA6800: 89%

NVIDIA NV40 Tech
Excellence in Engineering Award

Pros
Very fast card for its price range
Excellent 3D visuals
Excellent compatibility
Excellent bundle
Good construction
Overclocked out of the box

Cons
2D slightly blurry at high rez (1280x1024 and above)
128 MB of memory
Massive box

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