6800XT AGP

[rubberneck]

I currently have an Ti4200 and am looking at an upgrade (obviously). I'm a casual gamer but would like to get NFS-MW and Oblivion when it comes out. I've read in one forum where a 6800XT owner unlocked his 8/4 product to a 16/6 config. Info. on this card seems slim on the net. With a retail price of $139 at the Egg, this could be a great bang for the buck upgrade for a casual gamer like me. The Egg has an Asus with 128MB vram/256Mb bus/350core/700DDR mem and an 8/4 pixel/shader config.

Any opinions/ideas? Btw, I'm not going to a 754/939 as I don't have the $$$ so there's no need to make that recommendation regardless of how much joy you think it would bring to my life.

Thanks.

 

[Wolfshanze]

I believe you just use RivaTuner to unlock the 4-pipes and bring the 12-pipe 6800 to 16-pipe performance.... throw in some overclocking, and you've got a lot of perfomance for a little cost. That's the way it was with the 6800NU... I'm not 100% sure what all is differant with the 6800XT (if anything).

Correction... I really do need to read-up on the 6800XT... the 6800NU had 12-pipes with four unlockable... looks like the 6800XT has only 8-pipes, so that's another beast of a differant stripe.

Okay... did some double-checking... the 6800XT is less a card then the 6800NU... I don't think you can unlock pipes on it. It's no better then a 6600GT. At this point I'm trying to figure out why NVidia even bothered to make this card... it's stats are almost identical to the 6600GT.

If I were you I'd just skip the 6800XT and get a 6600GT... I think it's a wee-bit faster. They both have 8-pipelines and GDDR3 memory, but the clock speeds on the 6600GT are a bit higher. Not sure what the freakin differance is here... they both have the same price point and similar specs... why did NVidia release this chipset again? I guess there wasn't enough confusion on the market... I know, "let's release two nearly identical cards with identical prices and identical performance and confuse everyone needlessly".

Really though, if you can find anyone still selling the 6800NU, forget this mess and buy the 6800NU instead... I know you're on a budget, but you might find one for $20-$30 more if you look hard enough, and it will be a good boost (without having to pay for the pending 6800GS, which I'm sure someone will recomend for an extra $100 bucks over what you're currently looking to spend).

 

[rubberneck]

Yeah, the 6800NU might be the safest bet. I was thinking the 6800XT might be a sleeper that could be unlocked to 16/6 at which point it would be a bargain. If it's an NV40, I'm thinking those 16 pipes might be there waiting to be unlocked...

 

[phaxmohdem]

I've never heard of unlocking the 6800XT, if it was possible to unlock these things to 16 pipes, I'd have to believe that lots of people in these forums would be all over that thing like a fat kid on a cupcake, and we'd have heard about it in at least 23,583 different threads by now like the GTO2.