nVidia 6800.... Which one?

[leech]

Just kind of browsing around... still haven't decided what to do about the video card upgrade... as more and more games I'm finding won't work, and I'm losing patience in Matrox.. when will they ever (IF ever) come out with a linux driver for kernel 2.6....

I found on Pricewatch this;

Leadtek - LEADTEK GeForce 6800 A400 STD 128MB GEFORCE 6800 RETAIL BOX
Details:
-LEADTEK GeForce 6800 WINFAST A400 STD 128MB W/ VGA/TV-OUT/DVI/HDTV OUTPUT RETAIL VIDEO CARD
Part - VC-LEAD-020

Problem is, it doesnt' really specify on Leadtek's website what the A400 STD is.... That and from what I was reading somewhere earlier, the 6800 doesn't have support for HDTV in the chip.... though I suppose they could add it later.

The only Winfast A400 that Leadtek has on their website is the 6800 Ultra... (this STD one seems to use the FX 6800, anyone know of a place that shows the difference?) Again, one of the reasons I hate nVidia... at least Matrox names their flagship product something cool, then has the lower end versions named in sequential numbers.... nVidia and they're confusing "Geforce4MX is worse than a Geforce2..."

Leech

[Chrono_Wanderer]

If you decide to play games, i think you can drop the vanilla 6800. Consider the 6800 GT. Its relatively cheap, does not heat up as much, no PCI slot taken in most applications, has 1 molex only (use less power). From guru3d's review of 6800 GT released today, it doesn't really heat up much too.

The reason why I said not to consider the 6800 is because its a 12 pipeline architecture (i bet the 4 pipes are locked) vs. GT/Ultra's 16 pipes. They said GT has very good performance, while the non-GT/Ultra is similar to the 5950 only...

so something i thought i should mention.

My 2 cents

[leech]

Yeah, after digging around a bit found that...

From what I can tell here's the differences (though I still feel I'm missing something....)

The standard 6800 is clocked slower than either the GT or Ultra. It has 12 pipelines rather than 16 (as you said) and also uses DDR1 Memory interface.

Now from what I can tell (and yes, I was already interested in the GT) the only difference that I can see between the GT and the Ultra are the Clock speeds... The GT is clocked at 350Mhz Core and 500Mhz Ram and the Ultra is 400Mhz Core and 550Mhz Ram... The GT definitely looks like the card to get... it's only a bit slower in most things. Considering I don't think it matters much from 75 fps to 70fps in 1600x1200 (at least if I recall when I flashed through some benchmarks, that's what it got in Call of Duty.. and that's with the AA/AF set to max, I think...)

Seems like a pretty sweet deal... so is Leadtek a good one to go with? Their cards certainly look cool...

I'll be doing this upgrade once nVidia's linux drivers support the 6800 chips... doesn't look like they do yet....

Leech

[The PIT]

Errr none.

[Paddy]

ATI all the way baby

[leech]

The reason I'm going nVidia is because they are the only ones with decent support under Linux. Ati's a little better than Matrox, but still not quite there....

Now if Matrox would change their tune and go back to the way they were with the G400... then I'd gladly keep my parhelia..

This time around, it's not all about speed. It's about features. And I'll probably keep my Parhelia just for those games that support Surround Gaming. That makes it worth it for that card! The main reasons for getting a new card are 1) Linux support 2) DX9 Support... more and more games won't work on the parhelia.

ATI in my experience STILL sucks on the driver front... as explained elsewhere on these forums...

Leech

[rylan]

I've got a 9800pro in my new system and I haven't had any problems at all with the driver (only installed 3 revs of it so far). I do the normal thing of uninstall the driver, reboot and install the new one.

Oh and yeah, M probably doesn't have any driver people left who can do Linux.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

for the time being, i perfer nv over ati, simply because of SM 3.0. I'd sacrifice a little speed for it.

[leech]

The issues I've seen with the ATI drivers... go into the control panel and switch the settings on Direct3D from normal quality to Best Quality and see what it does... on a 9200, (at least I think that's what the card was) it totally borked the mouse and the computer had to be rebooted. Same with switching it back to normal from best quality. The mouse would disappear until you move it into the uper 8th or so of the screen, then it would turn into a square of multiple-colored dots and bounce up and down if you try to move it down.... but of course the mouse 'cursor' would stay up there, even when you moved the mouse down around and you could tell it was moving, because the dialog buttons would high-light...

Now if a simple thing like that will totally mess up operability... then no thanks....

And it did this with 2 different driver sets.

Leech

[bsdgeek]

I think the plain 6800 is the best deal if you're spending a sane amount of money on your videocard, but I wouldn't buy now since prices are inflated due to "rarity." (Same for the X800Pros out there)

But, at any rate, the 6800 seems to be on par with the X800Pro most of the time for $100 less.

Leadtek is also the one I would pick, they've had a rep for having generally higher quality boards (and stupid names, who would call their card STD? ). I think they still design their own, most others are now made by Nvidia through Flextronics and rebadged.

[leech]

But... but I want the GT.... I'm going to wait either way, mainly due to not having money at the moment... though I bet if I sold off one of my 21" monitors and my parhelia, I could afford one.. BUT, I don't really want to do that, due to some of those sweet triple-head games. I'd like the GT mainly due to it having the much faster Ram and the 16 pipelines rather than the 12... I don't exactly upgrade my video card all that often, so this would be a good investment, I think, for the next few years. At least once games start using the Vertex Shaders 3.0 or whatever they are (too many damned things now...) then I won't have to upgrade the card again.. unlike the ATI users

Leech

[Kurt]

Originally posted by leech
so this would be a good investment, I think, for the next few years.

Your AGP or PCI-Express years...?

[leech]

I don't really see PCI-Express catching on until probably the 2006-2007 timeframe. You have to figure that maybe some high-end gamers will go that route, but until more mainstream systems ship with PCI-Express, then AGP will still rule. By the way, what really is the advantage of it besides speed, which the AGP bus hasn't even really been fully utilized on?

Actually right now, I don't even have an AGP 8x board, but I don't know if there would be even the slightest difference in speed from the 4x to 8x.

Also, the thing about PCI-Express is that the confusion of all the 'standards' will hold it back... I mean there's PCI-X, PCI-E, I'm waiting for PCI-LSD... That's a poor joke, I know...

Leech

[Wombat]

Speed, fewer traces (it's a high speed point to point), distance (PCI-Express can go outside the box much the same way SCSI can).

[leech]

The benefits are nice, but to get PCI-Express, I'd have to get a new motherboard... and I'm waiting to go 64-bit for that. Well, I don't see myself really doing a major upgrade for quite some time... but at least if I can manage to get a 6800 GT, it might be that my 3.06ghz won't push it as fast as it can go.. Anyone know about that?

Leech