SUMMARY: Today we compare three of the latest nVidia based AGP and PCI Express graphics cards from Gigabyte. We look at the GeForce 6200 for the low-end market, the impressive value for money GeForce 6600GT with SLI support along with the high-end 6800GT AGP which offers great performance but not at the price of the very high-end models. Read on and work out which graphics card is best for your needs as we run them through our usual array of gaming benchmarks!
Now we take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum.
The N68T graphics card series is Gigabyte’s mid to high-end video card. Gigabyte has done some revolutionary designs with the N68T graphics card as you will see very shortly. Firstly before we look at the card we will have a look at the packaging and contents. The box that the card comes in is 30% bigger than that of the 6600GT box.
Inside the same package is included. Driver CD, S-Video/HDTV video out module, user manual, power splitter cable and the Doom 3 are all included.
Now we get a look at the card. One thing you will notice is the cooling straight away. Heatpipes have been used for some time; in fact they were pioneered by Zalman in the early GeForce 4 days. Gigabyte has started to use Heatpipes on their video cards in order to reduce the amount of heat generated as well as keep the noise down.
The Heatpipe unit comes in two pieces; one is the main body that cools the GPU and the back memory modules. This unit has a fan on the back in order to keep the card cool. Over this sits a large passive cooler which goes over the main body and cools the memory modules only on the front.
With the outer heatspreader removed you can actually see the main body pipe unit sitting on the GPU. This unit has two pipes that go over the GPU and lead to the back of the card where the pipes are then cooled by the single fan. The passive heatsink on the front that cools the memory modules does not make contact with the main body which allows the heat generated by the GPU to remain separated from the memory module cooling. One thing you must remember is that your case needs to have good air flow if you want to get good overclocking out of the card, as the memory modules on the front are passively cooled.
With the entire Heatpipe assembly removed we get our look at the core. The nVidia GeForce 6800GT core is simply a re-badged 6800 Ultra based core. It keeps the same 16 pixel and 6 vertex engines as well as its support for native AGP. Due to the AGP design there are no SLI capabilities.
Samsung FBGA memory once again populates the card. The modules are 2ns modules, identical to that of the 6600GT cards. The main difference here is that the card has a total of 256MB of memory onboard and uses a 256-bit memory array.
Overclocking Results
Again for overclocking Coolbits was used. With a default core clock of 400MHz and memory at 1GHz we managed with the stock cooling a stable core speed of 530MHz and a memory clock of 1.2GHz.
