Nvidia 6800 Ultra vs GeCube X850XT Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

With the release of new generation graphics cards, the battle between ATI and NVIDIA gets into another level. NVIDIA's ingenious SLi technology was successful thanks to their nForce4 motherboard chipset. While ATI struggles to prepare their AMR technology, we gather their top of the line Radeon to battle it out against NVIDIA's top of the line GeForce series. Based on the R480 GPU, the Radeon X850XT is currently the latest top of the line graphics card being offered by ATI. Then we have the GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is the best offering from NVIDIA. Priced at around $499 each, the GeForce 6800U will have to defend itself against the raging X850XT.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra

Powered by the NV45 GPU, the GeForce 6800U that we have here came directly from NVIDIA. The little mermaid that you can actually see on the cooler is named Nalu. Back in 2004, we saw NVIDIA made huge success with their Nalu mascot. Well, who can resist admiring at a beautiful mermaid, can you? The 6800U is actually the largest graphics card in the market. The massive cooler looms over two PCI slots and might be impossible to be incorporated into a SFF chassis.

Since the memory chips were all located on the front, the 6800U does not require additional heatspreader on the back of the card. The black coloured aluminium back plate provides additional support to keep the massive cooler in place and prevent the PCB from flexing. While most retail 6800U comes with an onboard video-in processing chip, our sample seems to lack that feature.

Although most 6800U comes with Dual DVI output, our reference 6800U sample comes with only a single DVI output. I?m not sure why this is happening but I?m guessing that this might be one of the earliest models of 6800U from NVIDIA.

Then we have the SLi connector onboard, which gives the choice of hooking up another graphics card into a single motherboard, provided that you have a motherboard with dual PCI 16x slot and a chipset that supports SLi interface. So if you plan to SLi a pair of 6800U, you might just have a shot at topping the 3DMark ORB. In short, SLi gives ?double?the performance than you can get from a single card. Currently, the SLi is only available for the PCI-E platform and the 6800U we have here runs on PCI-E. Nevertheless, you can find similar AGP version of 6800U without that SLi link.

Even though the PCI-E slot provides sufficient power for cards like 6600GT without additional power connection, the 6800U simply wouldn't be satisfied with that. It comes with a standard 6-pin PCI-E connector that feeds power directly from the power supply. Most recent power supplies comes with PCI-E connector, you might need a 4-pin to 6-pin PCI-E converter if your power supply lacks a PCI-E connector.

NVIDIA has put a great amount of research onto their cooling solution thus, a dual slot cooler was designed. The blower fan starts up at a high pitch but then muffles down as you boot into Windows. Unlike the cooler found on the X850XT, we could not manually control the fan speed on the 6800U. The good thing is, even at full load we could barely hear the noise produced from the stock cooler on the 6800U. Looking at the cooler, we can see that it was made mostly from aluminium. NVIDIA also incorporated a single heatpipe on the cooler to increase the heat transfer. Then a series of aluminium fins dissipates the heat from the heatpipe. On the third picture, we can also see that the onboard power regulators were also cooled by an aluminium heatsink. During operation, the power regulator heatsink was pretty hot to touch.

We wanted to learn more on the cooling mechanism thus, we made the decision to dissect it. First, we screwed open the aluminium plate where the Nalu was printed on. This reveals a very large copper cooler taking residence right on top of the core. The blower fan was installed on a piece of plastic shroud which can be easily removed by removing a series of screws. The cooler was actually built by two separate pieces of heatsinks. The heatpipe with aluminium heatsinks actually serves as a memory cooler, which keeps the memory chips cool. We found ?cloth like?thermal pads used in between the memory heatsink. Although this might be something new, we found the thermal pad tearing off easily upon removing the heatsink. I?m not sure how well it performs, but I have a bad feeling about it. In my opinion, standard thermal pastes works best!

Here you can have a closer look at the memory heatsink. It actually weighs much lighter than it looks. The only heavy part is the massive copper cooler. Sized similar to a CPU cooler, the heatsink works well in keeping the GPU core cool. We found silver based thermal compound used on the core, which is the better choice.

Here is the blower fan that we discussed earlier on. The fan was actually built by a rather familiar manufacturer known as Delta Electronics. The fan comes with only two wires which explain why it does not support fan speed control or RPM sensor.

Here we have the power regulator heatsink that I mentioned earlier. NVIDIA used the same ?cloth?thermal pad on the regulators as we found on the memory chips.

Upon cleaning up the core, the famous NV45 core was revealed. Then we have the memory from Samsung modelled ?K4J55323QF-GC16? which was rated at 1.6ns. The default speed on the core is 400MHz and the memory has an effective speed of 1100MHz.

Package and Bundle

Since we received the 6800U directly from NVIDIA, we welcomed the 6800U inside a metal briefcase with security lock. NVIDIA makes sure that even if someone steals the package, they will have tough time getting to the card. Inside the graphics card was nicely padded inside a bubble bag and the briefcase itself has foam padding. Although no additional software or driver was included, NVIDIA sent us a 4-pin to 6-pin converter to get the monster card up and running. Take note that you might find more bundled items on the retail packages offered by various graphics card makers.



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