EVGA e-GeForce 6800 GS 256MB PCI-E

Author:  Edward Chang Date:  2005.11.07 Topic:  Video Provider:  eVGA Manufacturer:  eVGA

Test Setup:

Test System

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ "Winchester" Socket 939

EVGA NForce4 SLI NF41 Socket 939 Motherboard

Geil 2x512 MB PC4400 Dual-Channel DDR RAM

Western Digital 120GB SE 7200 RPM UDMA 100 with 8MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP2

Video Cards

EVGA e-GeForce 6800 GS N386 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E (425MHz/1000MHz)

EVGA e-GeForce 6800 GT N376 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E (350MHz/1000MHz)

EVGA e-GeForce 6800 N383 256MB DDR PCI-E (325MHz/600MHz)

EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GT N518 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E (445MHz/1070MHz)

Rosewill Radeon X800 XL 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E (400MHz/980MHz)

Drivers

ATi Radeon Catalyst 5.10 for ATI Radeon video cards

DirectX 9.0c

Nvidia ForceWare81.87 for Nvidia GeForce video cards

Nvidia NForce4 AMD Driver version 6.70 for NForce motherboard

Benchmarks

3DMark03, 3DMark05, and AquaMark3 were run at default benchmark settings. In all other games, the video cards were first benchmarked at a standard 1280x1024x32-bit using the highest graphics quality settings in game. Where noted, the second of scores shows the performance with 4x Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering 16x enabled.

FutureMark 3DMark03

FutureMark 3DMark05

AquaMark3

Doom 3 Timedemo Demo1

CS Source Stress Test

Battlefield 2 Custom Daqing Oilfield Flyby

Overclocking and Unlocking:

With the nice copper heatsink for the core and thermal pads for the memory, we wondered how much this card can overclock. To our delight, EVGA's 6800 GS overclocks like a charm!

Using the latest RivaTuner utility, we overclocked this video card to 500 MHz core and 1150 MHz memory. That is a 75 MHz (17.6%) increase in core speed and 150 MHz (15%) increase in memory speed. At 500 MHz, this core is running even faster than a 7800 GTX. We did not run the card overclocked for long at these speeds, but it ran all of our benchmarks fine.

Now the bad news is that we were unable to unlock additional pipelines or vertex shaders using the latest RivaTuner; all existing pipelines and vertex shaders were enabled: