Nvidia Finally Shipping 6800 PCI Express GPUs

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20641' target='_blank'>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20641</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Nine months after its NV40 introduction, Nvidia is still struggling to ship most of its PCIe high end parts based on this core. NV45, 6800 GT or Ultra PCIe series are nothing more than an NV40 chip with BR2 bridge chip and specially PCB,but so far, Nvidia has hardly shipped any of the NV45s."</i><br /><br />This explains why I'm having such a damn hard time getting my hands on a 6800GT PCI Express :? - I've searched high and low, and I can't find anyone that has them in stock except for <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=6735504373&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT">one guy on eBay</a> who's selling the card with a motherboard, CPU, RAM - none of which I need. I ended up ordering a 6600GT, which is the most powerful card I could find with dual DVI ports, but not because I wanted to. :roll:

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Hmm, unless you play very intensive 3D games, I'm not sure if a 6800GT is really necessary. For the price and the depreciation involved I think the 6600GT is a good buy.

[Jason Dunn]

Hmm, unless you play very intensive 3D games, I'm not sure if a 6800GT is really necessary.

I play City of Heroes and I need to play it at 1600 x 1200, the native resolution of my Dell LCDs, so yes, I do need the burly power of a 6800GT. :-D Based on the benchmarks I read, the 6800GT is quite a bit more powerful than the 6600GT. Of course, if I fire up City of Heroes at 1600 x 1200 with the 6600GT and have decent frame rates, I'll be happy. :D

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Well, what I've found is that you can turn of FSAA and what not. when you're playing I find that in practice they make little difference. At most 2x FSAA. Beyond that I'm too busy whacking someone or something to care. The increase in framerates can be quite large! FSAA if you ask me is the 3D GPU industry way of making you buy a faster card than you really need.

I was going to point out the Gigabyte dual core 6600GT on a single card (effectively SLI using 1 slot) but unfortunately after reading the details it's a real hacker's solution as it works only with one Gigabyte motherboard.

BTW, that looks like a really cool game!