6800GT or 6800GS

[OleGeezer]

As the title suggests, a refurb 6800GT or a 6800GS within $10 of each other.

What do you guys think is the better option?

TIA.

 

[CKXP]

depends PICe or AGP? PCIe the 6800gs, AGP the 6800gt (no gurantee to unlocking the extra pipes with the 6800gs)

 

[OleGeezer]

PCIe

 

[mwmorph]

6800gt.

the 6800gs is as fast stock, but once ou start overclocking, it al falls apart. to compensate, a 100mhz overclock on the core of a 6800gt is equal to a 133mhz overclock on a 6800gs. the 6800gs is already heavily overclocked. the 6800gt has more headroom also.

The 6800gs is mostly competitive stock, but in certain situations like when aa is turned on, the 6800gt will pull ahead by quite a bit.

 

[OleGeezer]

Yeah, I kinda figured that even with all the good press the GS has gotten it would be hard to discount the 16 pipes on the GT when it comes to overall performance at roughly the same price.

 

[CKXP]

OleGeezer take a look, Anandtech

The 6800 GS cards will all sport NVIDIA's NV42 core. Previously, NV41 and NV42 cores were used on vanilla 6800 boards. The main difference between the two parts is that the NV41 is run on IBM's 130nm process (and was NVIDIA's first native PCIe part), while NV42 uses TSMC's 110nm process. And where there is a process shrink with no other major changes, higher clock speeds are more accessible.

6800gs 500/1360

We were much pleased with the overclockability of our sample of the card. We easily overclocked the GPU from the default 425MHz to 500MHz. The cooling system probably prevented it from speeding up more (the GPU was stable even at 540MHz, but there were some visual artifacts on the screen). But the real surprise was that the memory could work at 680 (1360) MHz ? a fantastic achievement for 2.0ns memory chips! We know of many cases when Samsung?s K4J55323QF-GC20 could work at 550-600 (1100-1200) MHz, but not higher! Could NVIDIA have culled chips especially for the engineering sample of the GeForce 6800 GS or maybe they just increased the memory voltage? It is probable since we could not be mistaken. The monitoring module of RivaTuner reported the frequency gain, and this gain resulted in an appropriate performance gain in tests, and the card was absolutely stable at that.

Guru3d 6800gs 515/1200

This GeForce 6800 GS from XFX seems to be a very nice card to overclock even though the card is already overclocked by default ! Core wise we could not go extreme amounts faster though, yet another 25 to 30 MHz is do-able. Memory then .. 1200 MHz without a hassle. I didn't look but there might be 1.6ns memory under the hood.

although YMMV, the 6800GS PCIe tends to be a excellent OCing card. there aren't too many 6800GT's than can't push past 440mhz+ on the core yet alone 1150mhz+ on the memory.

 

[OleGeezer]

Thanks for the reply CKXP but I don't plan on overclocking, shoulda' been a little more clear in the beginning. As it is, upgrading from a passively cooled 6600GT to a 6800 GT/GS with a referance fan is going to be bad enough unless I drop another $30 for an Arctic Cooler.

I do have one additional question about those factory OC GSs though.

If used an updated driver from the nVidia site rather than the drivers on the included CD would the card still run at 485mhz GPU/1150mhz memory that the manufacturers claim or would it be at the stock speeds?

 

[CKXP]

the card will come OC'd out of the box (485/1100) updating your drivers will have no affect on the clock speed that is factory set. you can only change the clock speeds by using a overclocking utility like "Coolbits" or "Rivatuner"

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: OleGeezer
Thanks for the reply CKXP but I don't plan on overclocking, shoulda' been a little more clear in the beginning. As it is, upgrading from a passively cooled 6600GT to a 6800 GT/GS with a referance fan is going to be bad enough unless I drop another $30 for an Arctic Cooler.

I do have one additional question about those factory OC GSs though.

If used an updated driver from the nVidia site rather than the drivers on the included CD would the card still run at 485mhz GPU/1150mhz memory that the manufacturers claim or would it be at the stock speeds?

yes. the clock speed is set in the bios.

 

[OleGeezer]

Thanks for all the input guys.