Fun with a GeForce 6800 (pics)

[Cybercat]

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.

[echow87]

420 core? not bad at all

[Brock Landers]

Good stuff, man. Good luck with this bad-boy. If you have a way to, I'd be curious to see what kind of temps you're getting with that HSF.

[Cybercat]

420 core? not bad at all

that's just what I run daily. You can see in the benchmark I ran higher.

Good stuff, man. Good luck with this bad-boy. If you have a way to, I'd be curious to see what kind of temps you're getting with that HSF.

Idle is around 41ºC, and load is about 47ºC (that's at 420MHz core). Yes, I've got plenty of room to breathe.

[don_vercetti]

hang on isn't that 480 core?

Anyway, that's less than 100 points off what i get with my unlocked 6800nu @440/980, so pretty damn good.

it's a lot smaller than the old AGP nv40 ones were. Looking forwards to the mods.

[madman2233]

thats the same card im looking at getting, but im gonna have an NV silencer on it, not a cpu hsf.

that is pretty insane.
good job

[NickS]

CPU HSF for Vid Cards pwnz0rs all.

Awesome lookin card there man.

[loud_tiger]

how did you attach the heatsink to the card?

[Cybercat]

Fun times. My first card is now KIA, not because I did anything wrong, but I stupidly checked the resistance of something on the card while it was still on..... Didn't like that too much.

Hoping they'll let me RMA.

[vtx_]

hopefully maybe they wont notice

[MaxxxRacer]

There will be absolutely NO discussion of fraudulent RMA's on XtremeSystems.

It is against forum policies and is morally wrong

[Cybercat]

You know I seem to have the worst luck when it comes to things like this. This is my third graphics card lost due in some degree to vmodding. My first was an AGP 6800, which I blatantly didn't know what the hell I was doing. Sent that one in to Catalyst.X, who tried to fix it but couldn't. Second was my PCIe 6600, which was successful, but because of some hotglue some tiny resistors were ripped off. Tried fixing it but it was just too small to solder. Amazingly small reason for a perfectly good card to go bad. The 6800 was fine as well, in fact for the most part everything went well, right up until I stupidly checked the resistance of the resistor controlling the VGPU while the computer was on, and that pretty much killed the core. Don't you hate it when something difficult goes along perfectly until one little thing at the end slips up?

Well anyway I'm debating if I should even continue attempting to vmod things, not necessarily because I don't know what I'm doing, but because with my luck something always seems to go wrong. Heh, my parents must think I was crazy even attempting it after going through two cards.

So is this the end of the story for this little endeavor? Maybe... I love extreme OCing but without a job, the financial penalty for such a hobby can prove too burdening to support.