Regardless the graphics adapter you purchase, one of the key things after performance, price, game bundle and all that other stuff is customer service. We have never exactly talked about this aspect of the product, but it's an important one. The cards generally perform the same from one manufacturer to another (unless they are factory overclocked), and they will cost just within a few dollars of each other. Although game bundles should be the separating factor, they are lackluster at best. However, customer service is something that should truly make or break the company, so to speak.

EVGA, as majority of you know, is one of the few American companies. What we have noticed over the years generally is that American companies such as EVGA and BFGTech tend to have much better technical support than some of the Asian companies. First and foremost, you usually have to fill out an online technical support form if you are dealing with Taiwanese manufacturers, but in EVGA's case, you can actually give them a call and get a resolution to your problem much quicker. We are aware of the fact that certain manufacturers like Asus offer the same nature of technical support, but in our experience, the hold times were far worse than what we experienced with EVGA or BFGTech. Of course, this could be that EVGA retails fewer products than Asus or other Asian manufacturers, but the overall response time was, in our opinion, commendable. That said, certainly not all Asian manufacturers are third class with customer service. Some, such as Abit and DFI, have been quite impressive with their response times via e-mail as well. Similarly, other manufacturers are not behind in the technical support department either, but our experience was better overall with companies like EVGA, BFGTech and Visiontek. The point of the whole discussion is that when you are weighing in your choices between various manufacturers, be sure to keep customer service in mind, as it could prove to be an essential aspect of the product.

Now that we have covered an introduction to technical support, let's move on to the actual product. First and foremost, EVGA is definitely not a flashy and strong (marketing wise) company as MSI, Asus, Gigabyte or BFGTech. Although their products have proven to be quality competent over the years, they could certainly improve their corporate image by participating in the market a bit more. Due to their lack of promotions and overall marketing efforts, at least you would get a far more affordable solution than the rest of EVGA's competition, which turns out to be a significant opportunity for both EVGA and its customers.

EVGA's 6800 PCIe is a latest addition to its product line. While making the switch from AGP to PCIe, EVGA has added an additional 128MB of memory to the graphics board, making the total to 256MB. The company has also changed the clock speeds on the memory from 700MHz to 600MHz, a reduction of 16.6 percent in overall clock speed. Logically, this has also dropped the overall available memory bandwidth from 22.4GB/s to 19.2GB/s. Despite the changes, the interesting thing to think about is if the 6800 vanilla can keep up with NVIDIA's 6600GT. Does EVGA's 6800 have what it takes to win the battle against the 6600GT? Read on and find out