Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (Socket 754)
• Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR motherboard (nForce 3 250Gb)
• Gigabyte GV-N68128DH
• ATI RADEON 9800XT
• 2x512 MB OCZ PC3200 (Dual Channel)
• Seagate Barracuda SATA V 120 GB
• Standard mid-size ATX chassis
• OCZ ModStream 520W power supply

Drivers

Both the Gigabyte GV-N68128DH and NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP were tested with Forceware 66.93 drivers. We will be doing a direct comparison between the plain 6800 and 6600 GT as they should have similar performance characteristics and they are not too different in price. We are curious to see how much better (or worse?) the passive-cooled 6800 is compared to the mid-range 6600 GT. The ATI 9800XT is tossed in there also - the 9800XT is in the same general price range as the 6800 as ATI does not currently have a R4xx based AGP card at the 300$ mark.

*edit The N68128DH came with BIOS revision F1 which for some reason only has 8 pipes enabled. We will be correcting the benchmarks shortly but keep in mind that the 6800 as is currently represented, is crippled. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Benchmarks

• 3DMark 2005
• Aquamark 3
• Call of Duty
• Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Halo
• X2 Rolling demo
• Splinter Cell
• Doom 3
• Half-life 2