djRoME Reviews the BFG Geforce 6800GT OC AGP

Well the time has finally arrived! I get around to gathering some info about this card. I've been sucked in by the beautiful visuals of this new video card, and my productivity has all but ceased. It was only after about 7 hours of WoW, 1 hour of UT2K4, 4 hours of Q4 and 2 hours of DoD:S that I actually got around to remembering I should have written this review.

While I was in game, I collected lots of screenies of the performance of this card.

Let me just say that the first impressions of this card are great, the box rocks, and on it there's a CPL logo. The caption reads, "Official Graphics Processor." That, coupled with the CPL's recent announcement that the 6800 is in their tournament machines is great news for me. I tend to trust brands with good backing.

I upgraded to this card from a Geforce FX5200. ATI was not an option for me because their drivers arent nearly as intuitive as NVidia's, so I stuck with the better drivers.

All of my games automatically knew that the card was different, and reset the settings accordingly. WHAT A HUGE UPGRADE. The FX5200 didn't support all of the new fangle "DirectX 9.0" shaders, and HDR lighting that the new card does, and it's a huge improvement. I started playing World of Warcraft again just for the visuals. I can run it in 1600x1200 with maxed out settings, and get easily twice the framerate as the old card at 1024x768 with the settings on low. The eye candy is SWEET!

Here's the performance of this card in REAL WORLD situations.

TEST SYSTEM:

AMD 64 3200+ (no overclocking) Venice Core
MSI Neo-2 Platinum Socket 939 Motherboard
1GB Corsair XMS Series Super Low Latency PC3200 (2-2-2-5 Timings)
BFG Geforce 6800GT OC 256MB GDDR3
RAID 0 2x 200GB Maxtor Diamond Max SATA-150 7200 RPM Drives
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value
Windows XP Professional (all the latest patches)

Photoshop CS2 9.0 was running in the background of all of the games to record my screen shots.

Counter-Strike Source Video Stress Test:

I hate Counter Strike, and the only reason I have loaded up this game is because it's the only Valve game with a video stress test built in. Results are:

142.35 FPS Average in 640x480 with all settings low.
130.97 FPS Average in 1024x768 with the auto detected settings.
90.59 FPS Average in 1600x1200 with all settings completely maxed.

Not sure how that compares with other Video cards/CPUs, but 90+ FPS with all settings completely maxed, including 6xAA is nothing to scoff at. The game itself looks great as well, though there's not much HDR programmed into the maps. Oh well, that's what DoD:S is for!

Day of Defeat: Source Host Server:

Since there's no built in Video Stress test in any other Valve game, I figured I'd see how the BFG Geforce 6800GT OC Handled the HDR lighting that's in DoD:S. I loaded up the best HDR and largest view I could find to try to tax the card a little to make framerates dip.

70 FPS in 1024x768 with all settings maxed.
60 FPS in 640x480 with all settings at lowest.
40 FPS in 1600X1200 with all settings maxed.

I run the lowest settings at the lowest resolution as a control, see how many frames the CPU can generate. For some reason, the lowest resolution with the lowest settings didn't produce a higher frame rate. None the less, handling the HDR lighting was no problem for the 6800GT OC. DoD:S is absolutely breathtaking visually with the settings maxed. I run the 1024X768 with all settings maxed and no AA when I play online, I get between 60-100 FPS depending on the map and location.

Quake 4 Single Player:

This game is nutorious for chewing up and spitting out video cards and CPUs, and it certainly didn't fail me when I tested the full range of it's demands.

10 FPS in 1024x768 with all settings maxed and 16x AA enabled.
58 FPS 1024x768 with all settings maxed and NO AA enabled.

6 FPS in 1600x1200 with all settings maxed and 16xAA enabled.
33 FPS in 1600x1200 with all settings maxed and NO AA enabled.

28 FPS in 640x480 with all settings maxed and 16xAA enabled.
66 FPS in 640x480 with all settings maxed and NO AA enabled.

27 FPS in 800x600 with all settings maxed and 16xAA enabled.
55 FPS in 800x600 with all settings maxed and 4xAA enabled.
65 FPS in 800x600 with all settings maxed and 2xAA enabled.

After I hit the server tick rate with 2xAA, it made no sense to lower it any further as there's no way to accurately measure lower resolutions.

UT2K4 Host Server Onslaught:

UT2K4 is another game with tons of eye candy, and it runs GREAT on any machine, but let's try to get this card to budge. Boy was it hard. I ran the CPU test; 640x480 with all setting on the lowest possible, and the average FPS was 104. Let's max her out and see how it goes. 1600x1200 with all settings maxed netted an 89 Average FPS reading. Again, this was on map Dawn, overviewing as much of the map as I could.

104 Average FPS with all settings low and no AA enabled.

For some reason I couldn't get UT2K4 to take a screenshot with the HUD in at 1600x1200 with all settings maxed. She still averaged 89 FPS during this test.

This card comes overclocked from the factory!

Yes, you're right. All regular GF6800GT's have a core clock speed of 350mhz. The GT OC version of this card runs at 370mhz, almost 7% overclocked. You can go ahead and try to get it overclocked further (it's literally as easy as dragging a slider in the drivers screen), it's quite easy with the NVidia drivers; since I plan on keeping this card for a few years, I'll let it be at it's stock clock speed of 370mhz.

CONS:

As of right now there's not a single con that I can think of for this card, so I'll bitch about the $320 price tag, and the fact that the card itself is physically a bit long. Also, make sure you have an extra power plug (not floppy size, and not SATA) available to plug into this card when you install it. She definitely pulls the juice! My version of the card is on AGP, not sure if the PCI-E has the additional power need.

BOTTOM LINE:

This card is the 2nd best NVidia card you can buy, topped only by the GeForce 6800Ultra Platinum Edition. It runs over $400 mail order, and $600 in store, so I decided to scale back a bit and jumped on the $300 deal at my local Best Buy. Was a good call since Newegg has the PCI-E version of the 6800GT (not the OC edition) for $312. Get over to Best Buy and snag one of these cards!

My old video card was the bottleneck for this system, and now the video card seems to be the perfect speed for this CPU and RAM combination. The only thing that seems to affect this card is the higher Anti-Aliasing settings, the rest it eats up. Quake 4 looks great, and I don't go any lower than 45 FPS during super high intensity combat. I've been reading and it doesn't seem possible right now to get rid of that little problem no matter what the video settings are, so let's just hope for a Q4 patch, shall we?

My upgrades are almost complete on this rig, I'll be adding another gig of the Corsair XMS Series Super Low Latency PC3200 RAM, and a new DVD burner (the burner is already ordered and in route).

9.0 out of 10 for this video card, one of the last AGP cards on the planet!