Intro

If you are a regular reader or a We Member you have seen my recent reviews of the Sapphire X600 Pro, Sapphire Hybrid X700 Pro, and the Sapphire Hybrid X800. The X700 and X800 offer some impressive performance for their price tags. Today I will be taking a look at Nvidia's offering to the cost conscious performance enthusiast... The 6800. The specific card I have for review is the Leadtek PX6800 TDH PCIe video card. The Leadtek name is very well known in the graphics card market. They have a track record of producing some damn fine cards and have been in the game since 1986. You can find more info on Leadtek at their "Company Info" page. Tiger Direct was kind enough to get me in contact with the people at Leadtek who were kind enough to send over two of these cards to be used in SLI testing as well! I have a SLI motherboard inbound and will be able to cover the SLI performance of these cards in an upcoming update to this article. Once I finish the SLI testing I will add the info to this article and post news of the addition. What makes this review so exciting (for me at least) is that it is a head to head comparison of ATI's and Nvidia's GPUs which are in the same cost bracket. It's always nice to do a comparison on products meant to directly compete with one another.

When you look at the specs comparing the X800 to the 6800 in the charts below the 6800 appears to be a tad behind the X800 on paper. The X800 has a higher listed Fill Rate and Memory bandwidth and it has one less vertex unit. Again, this is on paper. We in the PC enthusiast community have seen our fare share of impressive paper stats (BitBoys anyone?) so it is no surprise that many people don't pay much attention to paper stats and instead look for the benchmark bottom lines. Both the 6800 and the X800 have GPUs with comparable feature sets except the 6800 has support for Pixel Shader 3.0 in games which is more efficient than Pixel Shader 2 resulting in lower overhead when used (more frames per second = smoother game play). Only a handful of games support this feature so it isn't as beneficial as you might think. Even though the 6800 supports GDDR3 RAM Leadtek opted to outfit the PX6800 TDH with good old DDR RAM. One feature that I was impressed to see included was the ability to hookup to a HDTV display (up to 920 x 1080i resolution).

Package

The Leadtek PX6800 TDH box has the obligatory eye-catching 3D rendered character that is staple among video card packaging. The package contents contain the video card, manual, the full versions of Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell (similar to the recent Sapphire packages I have reviewed), some video related apps including WinDVD 5, WinFox II, and Muvee. A HDTV output cable and a DVI to VGA converter are the rest of the hardware. Both of the included games are top-notch so it's nice that they threw them in. So, if this is your first shiny new 3D video card you have a couple games to immediately fire up and enjoy.

Specs

Here are the specs pilfered from the Leadtek website.

Leadtek WinFast PX6800 TDH features a revolutionary design that delivers best-in-class performance on today's hottest games and applications. The only Graphic card in its class to support Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, the WinFast PX6800 TDH powers the latest effects without compromising performance. In addition, support for the latest bus architecture-PCI Express-increases both graphics and overall system performance.

Highlight

- SLI Multi-GPU Ready
- PCI-E-SIG certified
- Support Microsoft ® DirectX ® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
- Leadtek Ultra Cooling System
- Full-version Game Bundle( Prince of Persia & Splinter Cell)
- Video-editing software bundle ( WinDVD 5.0 ,WinFox II, Muvee )

Features

- Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support
Ensures top-notch compatibility and performance for all DirectX 9 applications, including Shader Model 3.0 titles.

- CineFX 3.0 Engine
Powers the next generation of cinematic realism. Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 enables stunning and complex special effects. Next-generation shader architecture delivers faster and smoother gameplay .

- On-Chip Video Processor
Delivers unmatched video performance, features, and quality. Next-generation PC games are not the only applications demanding more from today's graphics cards. Consumers are demanding top notch DVD playback, television encoding and decoding, and support for high-definition television formats from their PC.

- High-speed GDDR3 memory interface
Support for the world's fastest GDDR3 memory delivers fluid frame rates for even the most advanced games and applications.

- NVIDIA® UltraShadow T II technology
Enhances the performance of bleeding-edge games, like id Software's Doom III, that feature complex scenes with multiple light sources and objects. Second-generation technology delivers more than 4x the shadow processing power over the previous generation.

- PCI Express Support
PCI Express is a new Intel bus architecture that doubles the bandwidth of the AGP 8X bus, delivering over 4 GB per second in both upstream and downstream data transfers.

- NVIDIA SLI Multi-GPU Ready
Dramatically scales performance by allowing two graphics cards to be run in parallel.

- NVIDIA® PureVideo T technology
Turns your PC into a high-end home theater in stunning high definition with crystal-clear pictures, and the ability to enhance videos to full resolution in high detail.

- HDTV support
HDTV (High-Definition Television) is a new TV standard for consumer electronics. It has best image quality and high resolution.

- OpenGL® 1.5 Optimizations and Support
Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all OpenGL applications.