First Impressions and Overclocking

The cards

AGP-V6800 Pure

The back

DDR reference

The back

As you can see, our DDR reference board from Nvidia has a S-Video TV output and a flat panel out, while the lean AGP-V6800 Pure board only has the D-sub monitor output connector.

The memory

Our AGP-V6800 evaluation board has 32MB of Infineon HYB39D32322TQ 6ns DDR SGRAM. The 6ns rating indicates that we should be able to get the card up to 166MHz at least.

Overclocking

The AGP-V6800 installation CD comes with the ASUS Tweak Utility. The utility allows you to adjust the engine and memory clock speed of your ASUS card. If you use Nvidia's reference drivers, you can use the Nvidia overclocking utility, but you have to enable it in the Windows registry first. Using regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->SOFTWARE->NVIDIA Corporation->Global->NVTweak, and change the CoolBits string value to 3. New sliders for the core clock and memory speed should appear in the "Additional GeForce DDR Properties" menu.

Tweak!

We were able to clock the card all the way up to the maximum 130/175 setting without a problem. At first, the 137MHz engine clock seemed stable but artifacts started appearing about halfway through the Quake 3 tests. Ultimately, we had to settle with 130MHz. It looks like there's still a wide range in the quality of GeForce chips.