The Holiday Stop Gap: GeForce 6800 GS

The Card, The Test and Power

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.

Thus, the 6800 GS is physically the same as a vanilla 6800 with a higher core clock speed (425) and paired with GDDR3 at a 1000MHz data rate. From the 6800 GT, we see a decrease of 25% in pixel pipeline, but a ~21.4% increase in core clock speed. The net result is a theoretical core performance decrease of only 9%, but since NV42 doesn't require a bridge chip the results may be even closer than that. This puts the 6800 GS in the same class as the 6800 GT (but at a much lower cost).

The card itself is not remarkable looking compared to any of the previous generation 6800 cards out there. We see the familiar SLI connector on top of the card, stock HSF, and combination of one analog and one DVI port. The 6800 GS really does seem to be the result of someone realizing that the vanilla 6800 with an NV42 under the hood and some GDDR3 could revamp NVIDIA's midrange with little added cost.

The main reason this card will cost less than the 6800 GT is die size. Being manufactured as a 12 pipe / 110nm chip, NV42 will definitely be smaller and more cost efficient than the chip powering the 6800 GT. As far as we know, 6800 GT still uses the NV45 which features 16 pipes and is manufactured on a 130nm process. Combine this with the fact that NV45 is bridged from AGP to PCIe on package, and there is no question about the cost difference between silicon solutions.

What remains to be seen is how the current market will react. Our initial probes indicate that the 6800 GS will be a very limited offering with its cycle ending in Q1 06. With the potential to perform as well as a 6800 GT for the price of a vanilla 6800, the 6800 GS seems to warrant a longer shelf life than our sources indicate. Either way, the 6800 GS and ATI's X800 GTO parts point to limited run cards with excellent value growing in popularity. As with any good part, we would like to see the products linger a little longer, but the introduction of these late blooming parts is good for consumers in the market for a midrange card no matter why NVIDIA and ATI created them.

For our performance tests, we used this system:

Test Hardware

CPU:	AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz)
Motherboard:	EPOX NF4 SLI
Chipset:	NVIDIA nForce4 SLI
Chipset Drivers:	nForce4 6.70
Memory:	OCZ PC3500 DDR 2-2-2-7
Video Card:	ATI Radeon X800 XL ATI Radeon X800 GTO NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 5.10a NVIDIA ForceWare 81.87
Desktop Resolution:	1280x960 - 32-bit @ 60Hz
OS:	Windows XP Professional SP2

We measured power draw at the wall for each card as well. Load was generated by running our Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory benchmark and observing the maximum power draw. The 6800 GS falls somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of power draw.