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 then reapply it after I had the card installed. After plugging in the power cable, I was ready to go.
 
Noise:
With 2 fans cooling the card, a noticable hum can be heard, especially in 3D mode. But in my system, its not even noticable over the 2 120x38 mm radiator fans.
Temperatures:
Before I applied the AS5, temps ranged from 50-55°C idle, and in 2D mode browsing the web, and 72°C max load after 1 hour of Doom3. After Arctic Silver 5, the card now idles at 47°C, and 62°C Load overclocked to 425/1150.
Testing:
The Gainward Geforce 6800 GT Golden Sample was tested in a system with the following specifications:
Athlon XP 2500+ @ 2.3Ghz 230 fsb
DFI Infnity Motherboard
2 256MB Mushkin Black level 2 RAM at 230fsb 2-2-2-11
2 80GB Seagate SATA hard drives in Raid 0
Gainward 6800GT Golden sample
Directx 9.0C
Nvidia Forceware 66.00 betas set to no AA, no AF, High Quality
The testing consisted of evaluating the card's real world performance, overclocking ability, and results from three common benchmarks; 3DMark03's Default Test, AquaMark3's Default Test, and Doom 3's Time Demo 1.
Performance / Overclocking:
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 at least 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 its Golden Sample defaults of 350/1000 to 425/1150 for every day use, its completely stable, no artifacts, not even on the turtles back in 3Dmark03 Nature.
3Dmark03:
Futuremark's 3DMark03 is a common video system benchmark used to analyze gaming performance. According to the Futuremark website... "The high quality game tests, image quality tests, sound tests and others give you an extremely accurate overview of your systems current gaming performance." The results from the default benchmark, in unitless "Marks", are shown below (higher is better)...
Aquamark3:
Aquamark is a fairly standard benchmark for testing the gaming capabilities of video cards. According to their site... "AquaMark3 is a powerful tool to determine reliable information about the gaming performance of a computer system. Because the benchmark extensively utilizes DirectX9, DirectX8 and DirectX7 functionality, it represents the requirements of typical gaming applications in 2003 and 2004." The total score results from the default benchmark are shown below (higher is better)...
Doom 3:
Doom 3 is one of the latest, and most hardware intensive, games that also allows time demos to be run as a means of benchmarking. The review utilized Time Demo 1 at High Quality with Vsync On. Scores presented are the average frames per second reported. Each setting was run 3 times with the high and the low scores thrown out. The results are shown below (higher is better)...
As you can see here, at lower resolutions, the game is CPU dependant. But at 1280x1024 it begins to rely more on the video card. There is a 5 frame per second gain from 350/1000 to 425/1150.
Conclusion:
The Gainward Nvidia Geforce 6800GT Golden Sample video card is a great product that I would recommend to any hardcore gamer looking to upgrade their rig from any previous generation video card.
With a $450 US pricetag, mainstream users need not apply. The Geforce 6600 and Radeon x600 series cards would be a better choice. A search of PriceGrabber shows the Gainward Nvidia Geforce 6800GT Golden Sample available at a few places, such as; Newegg, Space Center, TheNerds.Net, and CompuAdds.
Final Rating (4.5 out of 5 stars):  
Pros:
Great looking
Great Performance
Great overclocks (easily hits ultra speeds)
Runs cooler than reference designs
Cons:
Price
Sofware bundle (looks like newer packages are shipping with Doom3)
Please drop by the BigBruin.Com forum and feel free to discuss this review.
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