Inno3D GeForce 6800 GS Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Under the Hood

Just like the reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800GS, the Inno3D GeForce 6800GS uses the exact same cooler. The cooler is a single slot cooler and a heatpipe is integrated into the heatsink. The cooler takes cool air from the blower fan and pushes it through the heatsink which exits out over the power regulators. This means, the heatsink will cause the case temperature to rise especially during intensive 3D gaming. So make sure you have a proper ventilated casing.

The Inno3D GeForce 6800GS uses a plastic cover which guides the air through the heatsink. The heatsink is built by two different materials; copper and aluminium. Unlike the GeForce 6800GT, the new 6800GS comes with a full copper GPU heatsink. Basically there are two separate heatsink where a copper heatsink is used for the GPU and the aluminium (black) heatsink is for the memory chips. You may also notice the bent heatpipe used together with the aluminium memory heatsink.

Here’s a close up shot at the blower fan. The 6800GS uses a Delta DC brushless fan (model BFB0712H), which uses 0.36A. At idle, the fan is almost unnoticed over my 120mm case fans. Even at full loads, the cooler ran fairly quite thanks to its advanced thermal controller. However, when we used RivaTuner to manually increase the fan speed, we noticed that the 6800GS can get a bit loud especially when your running on SLI mode.

The memory chip uses fiber thermal pads whereas a silver based thermal paste is used with the core.

The Inno3D GeForce 6800GS comes equipped with 256MB, 256-bit DDR3 Samsung (K4J55323QF-VC20) rated at 2.0NS and operates at 1000MHz effectively. Each of the eight memory chips holds 32MB of memory on board. The GPU was manufactured in Korea and was made on the 35week of the year 2005. Unlike the 6800GT, the aluminium shim on the 6800GS is missing thus we are a bit worried if it may risk of chipping and damaging the core during shipment. I’m not sure why NVIDIA decided to skip the aluminium shim but if it is to cut cost, I’d rather pay a bit more for the protective shim. We also noticed that the die has “GTS?marking, which actually should be labeled as “GS?only. Anyways, the GPU core has 12-pixel pipelines and runs slightly faster than the 6800GT at 425MHz, which makes up for the lesser pixel pipelines. By the way, the 6800GT has 16-pixel pipelines and was clocked at 350MHz core speed and 1000MHz memory speed. Considering that the 6800GS was built based on previous the previous 6800 generation, this GPU core could probably be the last entry to the 6800 family.

Noise and Temperature

Upon powering up the system, the noise produced by the graphics card cooler was easily noticeable over the system. However, the cooler sets itself to auto-mode when we booted into Windows thus making the cooler very quite. Even at full load, we could barely hear the graphics card over the rest of the system.

With the card running at 425MHz core and 1000MHz memory, the core temperature stayed below 46ºC during idle and 73ºC at full load. With the room temperature at 27.4ºC, the 6800GS recorded ambient temperatures at 38ºC during idle and 49ºC at full load. Manually setting the fan speed to maximum did not help a lot as we noticed only 1ºC drop at idle. For some reasons, the fan goes back into auto-mode when we loaded up 3D applications.



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