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BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC Review

BFGTech’s GeForce 6800GT OC video card and the gaming experience it can deliver. We compare it to a 6800Ultra and Radeon X800Pro playing FarCry, FlightSim 2004, PainKiller, Nascar Thunder 2004, City of Heroes, and Madden 2004. The GeForce 6800GT may just be the best gaming card for the price.

Introduction:

If you recall from our GeForce 6 Series Tech Article you will see that we explained that the NVIDIA “NV40” GPU technology will encompass a whole series of video cards from the value segment up to the enthusiast market. Among this series so far the only model we have tested is the reference GeForce 6800Ultra and BFGTech’s GeForce 6800Ultra OC video cards. The GeForce 6800Ultra and 6800Ultra “OC” cards are at the very top of market spectrum. They are the most expensive and the fastest, but they are not all that is currently available. There is another card which lies "below" the 6800Ultra and that is the GeForce 6800GT. At the time of our initial preview and tech article the name for this card had not been established yet.

The GeForce 6800GT very much reminds us of the GeForce 4 Ti4200. You see, the only performance difference between the GeForce 6800GT and GeForce 6800Ultra is the core and memory clock frequency! All 16 pipelines of the 6800Ultra are enabled and fully functioning along with every single feature of the NV40, including Shader Model 3.0 support. This is very much unlike the Radeon X800XT and Pro models that drop off pipelines as you move down in price and performance. To top it off the 6800GT only requires one Molex connector and has a slimmer HSF. But the most important part that matters to a lot of you is that the price is one hundred US dollars cheaper than a 6800Ultra. The "official" MSRP is $US399, but we have already seen 6800GTs below that. And like the 4200 of yesterday, they look to be overclocking to very nice levels according our forum users.

BFGTech has decided to tackle the 6800GT and add a little OC spin to it. They decided to take the card and overclock the GPU's clock speed for you right out of the box, with a warranty and everything. A regular GeForce 6800GT is clocked at 350MHz core (400MHz for a 6800Ultra) and 500MHz memory (600MHz for a 6800Ultra) which makes 1GHz GDDR3 speed. The BFGTech GeForce 6800GT however is clocked at 370MHz core frequency, which is 20MHz faster than a stock 6800GT. The memory clock stays the same and the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT is equipped with 256MB of GDDR3. The minimum power requirement for this card is a 300W power supply.

BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC:

Above you see a unique "whitebox" packaging that will adorn some of the newest BFGTech products. Depending on where you purchase them, the packaging might be whitebox, or it might be a more traditional retail package. Either way, the cards inside are exactly the same.

The minimum power requirement for the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT is a 300W power supply.

The very first thing you will notice with this video card is its slim nature compared to the 6800Ultra.

As you can see, the heatsink fan unit is not tall like on the GeForce 6800Ultra. The slot bracket has also been reduced to one. The GeForce 6800GT OC is a single-slot video card.

In the first picture above we have the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC compared to the BFGTech GeForce 6800Ultra OC. You can see that they are the same length, but their height is different. When we compare it to the X800Pro shown in the third and fourth picture, we found the height is exactly the same, but there is an obvious difference in length.

In the first picture above you can see that the BFG Tech GeForce 6800GT OC has only one Molex connector. The BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC does not have dual DVI, instead it has one VGA and one DVI port with TV-Out. In the third picture you can see the label and BIOS version for this card.

Included in the package is a Molex splitter cable and one DVI to VGA adapter. There are two CDs and a quick install guide also included.