OK. So, here's a review, minus pictures. more to come in the way of some benchies.
Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample Review by Nookie420
The packaging:
The Gainward Geforce 6800 GT Golden Sample came packed in nice foam, keeping it safe while being shipped.
The model I received happened to be a Dual DVI board. The card came packed with 2 red DVI to VGA converters, and 1 S-video to
RCA adapter.
The Software bundle was kind of lacking. A Driver disc, which included 2 different Forceware versions, Expertool, a Gainward
overclocking program, which limits you to 420/1200, Arx Faralax, a RPG style game which I have never heard of, WinDVD4, and
MuVee3 video Editing software.
The Card:
The Gainward Geforce 6800 GT Golden Sample sports a Red PCB, Dual DVI, a nice copper heatsink with skived fins on the GPU, and
it red Anodized heatsinks on the Ram. From what I can see Gainward used thick thermal pads on the ram chips, which comes as a
bit of a disappointment. As cooling goes, there is a Red Anodized plate that says "High Performance Copper Cooler" and houses
the 2 60mm Red LED fans that cool the card.
Installation:
Since the card requires 2 slots, I ran into a bit of trouble when installing it. The heatsink I had on the southbridge
interfered with the plate that holds the fans. I had to remove the heatsink and move it down about 5mm to get the card to fit.
After pluggin in the power cable, I was ready to go.
Performance:
I was happy to see that every game I have ran great at 1600x1200 resolution. With the exception of Far Cry and Doom 3, I was
able to run atleat 4x Anti Aliasing and 8x Antostropic Filtering and maintain a 30fps minimum.
This was a HUGE improvment over my Ti4600.
I was able to overclock the card from default 350/1000 to 410/1130 and receive no artifacts.
at 420/1200 I didn't notice any artifacts in farcry, but I wasn't looking either. Then it crashed. So I backed down to 410/1150.
No crashing but there was hardly visible snow pretty much all over the place. So back to 410/1130.
Temperatures ranged from 55°C at desktop to 70°C after an hour of Doom 3.
3Dmark03 score:
Stock: 10,476 350/1000
OC'ed: 12,076 420/1200
Aquamark3:
57,615
Doom 3: 1600x1200 High Quality all options enabled except vsync
Running demo01 in the command console as Domm 3's built in benchmark seemed like a bad judge of performance. As the demo ran, it would drop to very low, single digit frame rates, and sometimes pause for a second, then jump up to high framerates, 50+. Real game performance was never like this. I rarely ever seen a framerate lower than 35, even in battles with multiple Imp's on the screen.
Time Demo1 at 1600x1200 High: 35.8fps average.
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[COLOR="#FF0000"]Main rig[/COLOR]
Asus Maximus V Formula | i5 3570k @ 4.7Ghz | 2 x EVGA GTX 680 Classified | | 16 GB Corsair Vengeance | XSPC Raystorm RX 360 Extreme D5 custom loop | Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB | WD 2 TB Black | Corsair AX1200 | Corsair 800D | Windows 8.1 Pro
[COLOR="#0000FF"]Backup rig[/COLOR]
EVGA 780i SLI | Q9550 @ 3.54 Ghz | EVGA GTX 580 Classified | 4 GB Dominator | Corsiar H100 | OCZ Vertex 4 120 GB | WD 500 GB Black | Antec TQP 1000 | Lian-Li PCA10B | Windows 8.1 Pro |
