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Gigabyte GV-N68U256 GeForce 6800 Ultra Review September 06, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With its overclocked GeForce 6800 Ultra core, Gigabyte's GV-N68U256D GeForce 6800 Ultra should appeal to those of you looking for a GeForce 6800 Ultra card with a little more performance than stock. In addition, Gigabyte ships the card with one of the strongest game bundles we've seen this year. See how this card performs using NVIDIA's upcoming ForceWare 65 driver, as we pair it against a stock GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 GT, as well as the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition and X800 PRO. Does the new driver give NVIDIA the edge in Half-Life 2 VST and Counter-Strike Source beta? Find out now!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 22 ) |
With DOOM 3’s release last month, and Valve’s Half-Life 2 (and Counter-Strike: Source) right around the corner, countless gamers have chosen this summer to upgrade their graphics card. A selection of these gamers are hardcore enthusiasts that have been waiting twelve months or more to upgrade for these games, compromising on performance or visual quality to play them adequately is unthinkable. For these consumers, nothing less than the best will do.
Normally, this news comes as music to ATI and NVIDIA’s ears, as they receive higher profit margins on these graphics cores than they do on less expensive parts. But regrettably, snagging one of the high-end GeForce 6800 Ultras or RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition cards at both retail or online outlets has been rather difficult for consumers. A shortage of 1.6ns GDDR3 modules has been the holdup for both ATI and NVIDIA.
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Fortunately some board partners we’ve spoken to are bullish that September could be the month supply begins to catch up with demand. Note the use of the words “begins to”, we’re not predicting an avalanche of high-end cards are about to the market, in fact both ATI and NVIDIA will soon begin shipping their next generation of mainstream parts. But the word on the street is that by the end of the month, high-end volumes will be much better than they are today.
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With this in mind, we have Gigabyte’s GeForce 6800 Ultra card, the GV-N68U256D, up for review today. Gigabyte, already well known for their motherboards, also has an extensive graphics card lineup, providing cards based on graphics cores from both ATI and NVIDIA. In fact, Gigabyte was the first board manufacturer to adopt products from both graphics companies into their lineup. Incessant delays on NV30 hurt NVIDIA’s board partners, who were forced to peddle outdated GeForce4 cards for months. By providing cards based on technology from both ATI and NVIDIA, board manufacturers like Gigabyte aren’t tied to one graphics firm, allowing them to supply the market with cards even when one company slips.
Gigabyte doesn’t want to be known as just another NVIDIA board partner however. Their “GT” line of overclocked GeForce FX cards were their first efforts at targeting hardcore gamers and hardware enthusiasts. This tradition continues with the GV-N68U256D, as Gigabyte has spiced their 6800 Ultra card by overclocking it from the factory. This should allow the GV-N68U256D to run faster than your typical GeForce 6800 Ultra card!
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 2 / 22 ) |
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At first glance, Gigabyte’s GV-N68U256D looks like your typical GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card. But as we’re about to show you, it’s what’s inside that counts.
The GV-N68U256D starts life out like other GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in the sense that not only does it follow NVIDIA’s reference design, it’s literally manufactured directly by NVIDIA. Currently all GeForce 6800 Ultra cards share the same basic components, right down to the plain green PCB NVIDIA uses. Board partners can then customize their offerings with special cooling, or a unique software bundle.
In the past, NVIDIA has provided strict guidelines on clock speeds that board partners such as Gigabyte must adhere to. NVIDIA wanted to ensure a consistent level of quality on their high-end boards, regardless of manufacturer. This is also why they decided to take over production of these cards. For GeForce 6800 however, this appears to have changed, as multiple board partners have announced GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra cards that run at clock speeds that are higher than the stock, reference clocks for the graphics core and memory. Gigabyte clocks their GV-N68U256D graphics core at 425MHz by default. This is an improvement of 25MHz, improving fill rate from 6.4Gigatexels/second to 6.8Gigatexels/second. Memory frequency remains at 550MHz (1.1GHz effective), the same speed as a stock GeForce 6800 Ultra.
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Other than the core clock frequency boost, the GV-N68U256D is unchanged from NVIDIA’s reference board. The GV-N68U256D is outfitted with the same dual-slot cooler we’ve seen on other GeForce 6800 Ultra cards. Gigabyte’s website pictures the GV-N68U256D with a copper cooling system, but our board (and the 6800 Ultra card we saw at Computex) relies on aluminum instead.
As a 6800 Ultra, Gigabyte’s GV-N68U256D sports dual DVI connections and requires two Molex connectors to operate properly. If the card’s power connections aren’t properly connected, you’ll know it – every GeForce 6800 Ultra ships with a small speaker. This speaker will dish out the most ear shattering noise we’ve ever heard from a PC if the card doesn’t receive enough juice.
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Besides the GV-N68U256D card, Gigabyte also throws in standard hardware accessories like an S-Video cable and two DVI adapters, as well a copy of PowerDVD 5.0, Novalogic’s Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising, a game which was just released in June of this year, and Thief: Deadly Shadows, which is another brand new title. Not bad at all!
| Test systems | Page:: ( 3 / 22 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (nForce3 Ultra)
1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2
ATI X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI X800 PRO
Driver version CATALYST 4.8
Gigabyte GV-N68U256D GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra Reference board
PNY Verto GeForce 6800 GT
Driver version 65.76
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)
Far Cry 1.2 (custom demos for mp_jungle and research, SM2.0b and SM3.0 paths used)
DOOM 3 (gameplay custom demo)
Half-Life 2 VST
Counter-Strike: Source Beta (custom de-dust demo)
| Call of Duty | Page:: ( 4 / 22 ) |
Call of Duty – OpenGL
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 5 / 22 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL
| Lock On: Modern Air Combat | Page:: ( 6 / 22 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| UT 2004 | Page:: ( 7 / 22 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2004
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 8 / 22 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
| Tomb Raider | Page:: ( 9 / 22 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Tomb Raider 4xAA | Page:: ( 10 / 22 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
| Halo | Page:: ( 11 / 22 ) |
Halo – Direct3D
| Far Cry Research 4xAA | Page:: ( 12 / 22 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Research 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 13 / 22 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Far Cry Jungle 4xAA | Page:: ( 14 / 22 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Jungle 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 15 / 22 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| DOOM 3 High Quality 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 16 / 22 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
Notes
When looking at the DOOM 3 numbers, it’s important to keep in mind that we’re running our own custom demos now, and not the stock demo1 benchmark that ships with the game. Our demo comes from the Alpha Labs level, and while it isn't quite as intensive as demo1, it's still fairly action-packed.
| DOOM 3 Ultra Quality 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 17 / 22 ) |
DOOM 3 – OpenGL
Notes
GeForce 6800 cards take a much smaller performance hit from turning on DOOM 3's "Ultra" quality mode than do RADEON X800 cards, we first saw this in our DOOM 3 High-end performance article last month. The difference in performance is actually pretty astonishing.
| Half-Life 2 Video Stress Test | Page:: ( 18 / 22 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| CS: Source beta | Page:: ( 19 / 22 ) |
Counter-Strike:Source Beta – Direct3D
Notes
Unfortunately, our original cssource_firingsquad.dem demo is incompatible with the latest version of CS: Source beta. The changes Valve has implemented squash a lot of bugs and the skywalker exploit is gone, but we’ve noticed that the game is more CPU-limited than before. You can see this in our benchmarks above.
We’ve recorded over 30 demos with the latest CS: Source beta: long demos, short demos, demos with lots of grenades, demos with no grenade usage, demos with smoke, without smoke, etc, but regardless of what we do we’ve run into the same problem. Hopefully the final version of CS: Source won’t be as CPU bound as it currently appears to be and will scale better with our hardware. In all likelihood though this is something that could change with each follow-up version of CS: Source once the game ships.
| Overclocking | Page:: ( 20 / 22 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 21 / 22 ) |
Pros
Overclocked GeForce 6800 Ultra core: Gigabyte clocks the graphics core on their GV-N68U256D card at 425MHz by default. This is an improvement of 6% over the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra clock frequency, giving the GV-N68U256D a performance edge over regular GeForce 6800 Ultra cards.
By overclocking their card from the factory, the GV-N68U256D would also be a good option for those of you who have always wanted to dabble with overclocking but have been reluctant to try it, as the GV-N68U256D comes overclocked out of the box with a full Gigabyte warranty.
The benefits of NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra have been well documented by this site in the past. Not only do you get the breakneck performance of the 6800 Ultra’s 16 pixel pipelines and 256-bit high-speed GDDR3 memory, but also the addition of shader model 3.0 support. Developers appear to be adopting shader model 3.0 fairly quickly. Already we’ve seen one shader model 3.0 title come, and then quickly be recalled (Far Cry), the Painkiller expansion will also boast shader model 3.0 support. In an interesting move, the Source engine-based Vampire: Bloodlines will also take advantage of shader model 3.0 at some point.
Game bundle: We were very impressed by the game bundle Gigabyte included with the GV-N68U256D. Included in the box is a copy of Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising. This is a first-person shooter from Novalogic that emphasizes team-based multiplayer combat, in a similar fashion to Battlefield: Vietnam. Thankfully it’s much better than Black Hawk Down, earning a solid 8.2 rating on Gamespot and 4.5/5 stars from Gamespy. Thief: Deadly Shadows is the second game bundled with the GV-N68U256D. Again, this is another recent title that has earned positive reviews online. Gigabyte deserves major kudos for delivering two fresh titles that will offer entertaining gameplay for any respective GV-N68U256D owner.
Cons
Price: At $500 MSRP, Gigabyte’s GV-N68U256D, like any GeForce 6800 Ultra card, is by no means an inexpensive graphics card. NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT is based on the same core and memory, only it ships with lower clock speeds and is priced at $400. Considering how close the GeForce 6800 GT came to the Gigabyte card in our testing, this would make the 6800 GT a better value. Fortunately Gigabyte’s got you covered there, as they also offer a GeForce 6800 GT card, the GV-N68T256D.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 22 / 22 ) |