New GeForce 6800, Ahoy!

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It’s suffix juggling time again. We’re got Ultras, GTs, XTs. LEs and even plain 6800, 6600 and 6500, 6200, 6150 and 6100. You know what we need…? Another category!

Well, that is what nVidia seems to think anyway, after all with just 13 different six series cards across five different classes you can’t expect to cover all the angles, can you?! Still, linguistic bitching side, the introduction of this card is certainly a good thing as it brings the 6800 club to the middle ground.

The dutiful Benny has bought you a full performance preview of this baby over here, but let’s have a quick run through the numbers and a couple of the consumer bundles. For roughly £165 you’ll be getting an NV42 based chip fabbed at 110nm with native PCI Express support. There’s 12 whole pipelines and five dedicated vertex shaders clocking in at 425MHz, while memory races along at 1GHz creating a chunky 32GBps of bandwidth.

Performance in our labs shows the GS is ready to grab back some of the middle ground ATI has managed to steal away (despite the Canadians struggles with its flagship products) and if you’ve the spare cash you could do a lot worse than invest it here.

Point of View and XFX have been super quick in rushing to tell us they will be producing variants (we know lads, we know) with both kind enough to throw in a couple of shots illustrating their fiddlings. Both confirm their cards will be in the £160-£170 region and XFX has gone crazy announcing three variants on the reference design (with core and memory speeds of 425MHz, 450MHz and 475MHz and 1GHz, 1.05GHz and 1.1GHz respectively). XFX will also bundle a full version of Far Cry with each edition

Point of View has kept things a little more sedate with its 425MHz, 1GHz offering but it did spray a tacky 3D snake onto the card and box which makes up for it. No details of what’s inside its offering, but we’re sure it is just being coy about a whole bag of loveliness. Expect the usual gallizion suspects to appear with their own customised and not so customised versions in the next 48 hours.

Link:
nVidia UK
Point of View
XFX UK

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