Not a whole lot of people mess with 6800s, at least the PCIe line. Understandable I suppose, because prior to a few days ago they were, for the most part, overpriced and competing with the obviously superior-performing X800XL.

Well I'm a guy for unique cards, and with $230 and a love of extreme overclocking, I picked up a Leadtek 6800 256MB from Monarchcomputers.com.

First for a briefer on why these are (IMO) the new fun spot for overclocking. At first the 6800s used NV41 cores, which were NV45s with minor alterations. Only changes were native-PCIe support (a good thing), and only 12 pipes on die (a bad thing). Well with no bridge chip and less transistors, they turned out to be decent overclockers, but were largely overlooked by enthusiasts for many reasons.

Fast-forward to nowindays, where NVIDIA has now (without any big announcements or prior notice) REPLACED the NV41 with the NV42. The difference? The NV42 brings the process size down to 110 nanometers! NVIDIA has also lowered the price on these cards substantially. The implications? A cheaper, cooler running, lower power consuming, more overclocking-friendly chip for us to play with!

So I got my Leadtek 6800 on my doorstep Monday (yesterday), and have since then been vigorously testing and OCing until the card bleeds (which it hasn't....yet).

As a result the card when from looking like this out of the box:



To looking like this:



The result? Well so far I've only done a test run (no tweaks or anything) and AFAIK it's the highest for any single 6800 (PCIe) on Futuremark (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Go see for yourselves:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1126022

My next venture? Volt mods, and RAM sinks.

I'll keep y'all posted.