Although ATI and NVIDIA battle for the leading performance at any cost with their high-end graphics products, a battle that all the computer enthusiasts keep an eye on, the majority of consumers cannot afford to spend half a thousand of dollars on a single graphics card, which is why reviews of performance-mainstream and mainstream products should offer a huge interest.

NVIDIA Corp. recently introduced its highly-discussed GeForce 6800 GS graphics product in an attempt to offer alternative to ATI's RADEON X1600 XT-series. The recommended price for this performance-mainstream graphics card is set at $249, which should make a lot of eyes looking towards it. The only question left to be answered is the performance level that is offered by this latest addition to the GeForce graphics cards family.

A number of web-sites have published reviews of the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS graphics card, which confirms the high interest for this hardware part.

?span>The 6800 GS is physically the same as a vanilla 6800 with a higher core clock speed (425) and paired with GDDR3 at a 1000MHz data rate. From the 6800 GT, we see a decrease of 25% in pixel pipeline, but a ~21.4% increase in core clock speed. The net result is a theoretical core performance decrease of only 9%, but since NV42 doesn't require a bridge chip the results may be even closer than that. This puts the 6800 GS in the same class as the 6800 GT (but at a much lower cost),?writes AnandTech.

?Our particular GeForce 6800 GS sample turned out to be one heck of an overclocker. We were able to take our card up from its default 425MHz core clock speed all the way up to 540MHz, and were able to increase its 1.0GHz memory clock sup to 1.23GHz. Yes, that an 115MHz increase in core clock speed (27%) and a 230MHz increase in the memory clock (23%). And as you?d expect, pushing the core and memory clocks up by over 20% had a significant impact on performance,?reports HotHardware.com.

?In terms of fan noise, power draw, and overall performance, the GeForce 6800 GS runs neck and neck with the Radeon X800 XL. That's not bad at all for a card that starts life at the $249 mark. If history is any guide, board makers will offer discounts and ?overclocked in the box?clock speeds to make the 6800 GS even more appealing than NVIDIA's stock design,?concludes The Tech Report.

• AnandTech: The Holiday Stop Gap: GeForce 6800 GS.
• bit-tech.net: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS.
• ComputerBase:?NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS (German).
• DriverHeaven.net: 6800GS 256MB and ATI Radeon X1600XT 256MB.
• FiringSquad: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS Performance Preview.
• Guru of 3D: GeForce 6800 GS 256 MB.
• [H]ard|OCP: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS Preview.
• Hartware.de: GeForce 6800 GS?from NVIDIA (German).
• HardwareZone: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS (PCIe).
• HotHardware.com: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS.
• nV News: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS Preview.
• The Tech Report: NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GS Graphics Processor.
• : NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS - The Best of the Holiday Season 2005?