Date:
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

BFGTech GeForce 6800 OC

BFGTech’s GeForce 6800 OC is taken through our full gamut of gameplay evaluation to find out how this card compares to others. In case you are not up on nomenclature, this is the "vanilla" or "non-ultra" 6800 that has its pipelines scaled back to meet a lower price point.

continued...

Test Setup:

ABIT AV8 (VIA K8T800), AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 2.45GHz, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0c.

BFGTech GeForce 6800 OC – Operating at default clock speeds 350MHz/700MHz using ForceWare 61.77.

BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC – Operating at default clock speeds 370MHz/1GHz using ForceWare 61.77.

ATI Radeon X800Pro – Operating at default clock speeds 470MHz/1.12GHz using Catalyst 4.8 (WHQL).

For our comparison today we will take the BFGTech GeForce 6800 OC and compare it with the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC so that you can see the difference between the two. Keep in mind the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC is selling for one hundred more dollars than the BFGTech GeForce 6800 OC. We also threw in an ATI Radeon X800Pro for comparison as well since it also has 12 pixel pipelines just like the GeForce 6800 OC. However keep in mind it too sells for one hundred dollars more than the BFGTech GeForce 6800 OC.

Notice above we have changed our reviewing system and have opted for a very fast AMD Athlon 64 FX platform using the ABIT AV8 Socket 939 motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 CPU. We have also updated to the final official release of DirectX 9.0c and are using the latest drivers found on NVIDIA and ATI’s WebPages. As of this review Service Pack 2 for WindowsXP was not released yet, all future reviews will use this new service pack.

Article Image Article Image

With the ForceWare 61.77 driver Trilinear Optimizations are ENABLED and Anisotropic Optimizations are DISABLED by default. We left all driver properties, including the Trilinear and Anisotropic Optimizations to their default settings except we did disable VSYNC and manipulated 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 benefit of framerates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.