The Card

Immediately you will notice that the Leadtek PX6800 TDH is built from the green PCB of yesteryear. I found the placement of the RAM curious since I rarely see RAM situated in a 45 degree in relation to the card layout. This peculiar layout is due to Leadtek's "Ultra Cooling System" where the RAM is placed in a radial pattern around the GPU cooler which is designed to vent air across the RAM. The RAM on this card is Hynix brand part #: HY5DU573222 which is spec's to run at 350MHz (700MHz effective). Since the card is stock clocked at 300MHz the RAM overclock yields should be pretty decent (we'll get to that very soon). Under the aluminum cooler (held in place by some simple plastic posts) we can see a nice application of what seems to be some mid-grade heat transfer compound. I have also included a shot of the cleaned off GPU for your pleasure.

The I/O Plate comes equipped with a DVI port, a standard VGA port and a S-Video port which can also hook up to a HDTV monitor via the included adapter. Alas, no native dual DVI. LCD's are getting cheaper and cheaper everyday and since this card is SLI capable it would sure be nice to be able to check out the power of two of these cards in tandem across multiple LCD screens. Not everyone has enough cash to spend on a dual video card system but those that do most likely would be interested in investing in those multiple LCDs as well. I'm a single LCD screen gamer myself. :) For those of you not informed about SLI let me sum it up for you. SLI (short for Scalable Link Interface) allows you to run two PCIe video cards together (on a PCIe capable motherboard) allowing them to work together in a seamless fashion. This provides stellar performance under the most strenuous gaming circumstances. At 1024x768 with moderate settings a 6800 Ultra can be CPU limited. When you up the visual settings to max quality at 1600x1200 with x4 AntiAliasing and x16 Anisotropic Filtering then most video cards will certainly buckle under the load; Throw in a 2nd card, however, and you are in gaming nirvana. The 6800 does not need an external power source due to PCIe's bumped power supply capabilities over the older AGP interface. The 6800 is a bit longer than the X800.

Overclocking

I was hoping that this card would come equipped with GDDR3 like the X800 did. The 6800 GPU supports GDDR3 after all. Leadtek, however, opted to go with DDR. Not that big of a deal really. I was just hoping for that large OC. :) Like I stated earlier, the RAM on this card is spec'd to run at 350MHz but comes stock clocked at only 300MHz. I used Nvidia's excellent built-in auto overclock function after applying the good old coolbits registry hack and ended up with a surprising 420MHz for the GPU (stock was 325MHz) and 413MHz for the RAM. That's 63MHz over the spec'd speed. Not bad at all. I tried raising the clocks above these settings but ran into visual artifacts when testing. The auto-overclock provided stable clock speeds for all of my testing.

While testing the cooler was not audible. I really like the design of the GPU cooler as it does a very good job of distributing it's airflow all over the card.