Board analysis

Another shot of the $400 cards

6800 GT boards are longer than X800 PRO

PNY first made a name for themselves in memory, where they’re already well known and respected for providing dependable memory modules. In fact, alongside Crucial (Micron), PNY is one of the more established names in the memory business, with their modules being sold practically everywhere.

PNY has also been in the graphics business for years now, with products dating back to NVIDIA’s GeForce2 GTS. But that’s not all. Here in America, PNY has the exclusive on all Quadro card production. These cards are used in high-end workstations costing thousands of dollars.

Here you can see the two cards lined up again

The 6800 GT has a single slot cooler

Based on all this, it goes without saying that PNY is one of NVIDIA’s closest board partners, with Tier One status. This allows them to bring boards to market faster than many other card manufacturers.

Their Verto GeForce 6800 GT is practically a replica of the GeForce 6800 GT reference board we received from NVIDIA. This is because their Verto board actually came off the same manufacturing line as our reference card. In fact, when we installed it in our Pentium 4 3.4GHz testbed right after using the reference 6800 GT, Windows XP didn’t recognize that we’d installed a different graphics card!

Much slimmer profile on the 6800 GT

Verto GeForce 6800 GT up close

While a lot of enthusiasts scoff at the idea of a reference board, reference designs aren’t always a bad thing. In the past, some card manufacturers have used dodgy components on their graphics boards, resulting in inferior 2D and DVI quality. To resolve this, NVIDIA stepped in to ensure that a minimum level of quality is in place on high-end, $400+ cards. Besides using higher quality components, NVIDIA goes out of their way to design and test their boards under a wide variety of conditions. This means that the Verto GeForce 6800 GT has been battle-tested and designed to meet the needs of more demanding consumers.

PNY doesn’t do anything flashy with their Verto GeForce 6800 GT, instead the goal is to get the hardware in the hands of customers at the lowest price possible. This means that the card ships with no game bundle, which can add to the card’s cost. From a hardware perspective, PNY follows NVIDIA’s reference specifications to the letter -- you’ve got the same 350MHz core/500MHz memory (1.0GHz effective) as the stock 6800 GT -- as well as the same cooling.

The top of the card

Bottom of the Verto GeForce 6800 GT

Software and accessories

Besides the driver and GeForce6 demos CDs, the card ships with a copy of NVDVD, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, S-Video cable, and power cable. In a bit of a twist, PNY also includes a free insulated beverage cooler with every card ordered directly from them. This can be used to keep your drink cool at LAN parties.

UPDATE 8/16/2004: It has come to our attention that PNY has partnered with CompUSA to provide a free copy of DOOM 3 with the purchase of a Verto GeForce 6800 GT. This allows you to save $55 if you planned on picking up a copy of DOOM 3.