Date:
Tuesday , July 27, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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BFGTech GeForce 6800U OC with Water Block

Want to know what the fastest GeForce 6800Ultra in existence will do for you in games? We show what the BFGTech GeForce 6800Ultra OC with Water Cooling can do for you in real gaming situations.

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Test Setup:

ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz “C”, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b.

BFGTech GeForce 6800U OC w/ Water Block – Operating at default clock speeds 470MHz/1.1GHz using ForceWare 61.45.

BFGTech GeForce 6800Ultra OC – Downclocked to stock 6800Ultra clock speeds 400MHz/1.1GHz using ForceWare 61.45.

ATI Radeon X800XT-PE – Operating at default clock speeds 520MHz/1.12GHz using Catalyst 4.7 (WHQL).

As you can see above, we are using ForceWare version 61.45 in this review. With the ForceWare 61.45 driver, Trilinear Optimizations and Anisotropic Optimizations are ENABLED by default. We left all driver properties, including the Trilinear and Anisotropic Optimizations to their default settings with the exception of disabling VSYNC and manipulating the AA and AF level sliders for each game.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit different from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples”. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find the benefit of framerates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

FarCry

(DirectX 9)

We are using the full version game of FarCry with patch 1.1 applied. At the time of testing, the official final version 1.2 patch was not released. We will use the new version 1.2 patch in all reviews once it is released to the public.

We set the in-game advanced video quality settings to their highest levels as shown below.

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For the X800XT-PE, we set the AA and AF level from within the driver control panel. For the GeForce 6800 series, we set the AF level through the control panel, but we had to set the AA level through the game in order to enable AA in FarCry.

We graphed a manual run-through using the “Fort” level.

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Even with the BFGTech 6800Ultra OC with Water Block clocked up to 470MHz core speed, we still found 1280x1024 with 2xAA and 8xAF to be the best playable settings in this game, matching the quality of a regular 6800Ultra. However, there was a noticeable performance increase, taking us to near 30fps for a minimum and averaging 46fps. The Radeon X800XT-PE managed to achieve 1600x1200 with 2xAA and 8xAF and only dropped down to 28fps once. We also found that 1600x1200 with no AA and no AF was very playable on the BFGTech 6800Ultra OC with Water Block if you choose to play at that resolution. The added core speed does help smooth out some rough spots in the game where performance would get noticeably choppy on a regular 6800Ultra. The higher core clock speed did provide a smoother ‘feel’ to the game.

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In the first screenshot above you can see how AA compares. Keep in mind they are at different resolutions and will look different in game. In the second picture above we have one of the water effects displayed, and as you can see both look identical in effects quality.