This GPU is presented by Palit GeForce 6800 card.

Features:

• NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra (12 pixel and 5 vertex pipelines), 325 MHz clock;
• 128MB DDR SGRAM in 8 Hynix BGA chips; 350 (700) MHz max. clock rate.
• 256-bit bus;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode without optimizations is 3900 megapixels/sec and 3900 megatexels/sec.

By the end of the month the product costs $190-220, supports DirectX 9.0c (Shaders 3.0).

This product was initially released for the $300 niche. It supports all modern technologies, including Shaders 3.0. AGP x8/x4 interface. 2.8ns fetch indicates the actual 350 (700) MHz clock rate. 256-bit bus.

This is a rather popular card with considerable GPU power and moderate price. Pity, but you might stumble upon 6800LE cards with 8 pixel and 4 vertex pipelines that are named the same. Or 12-pipeline 6800 cards with 4 of 5 vertex shaders. Therefore be careful. The new version of RivaTuner (available at www.guru3d.com) not only shows you the exact number of pipelines, but can manage them if not blocked in hardware.

RivaTuner utility will allow you to enable all 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines of NV40 bypassing the hardware lock. But this will be like a lottery, as only your experience will tell if they are operable or not.

You can read more on GeForce 6 Series in our reviews: Theoretical and analytical graphics card reviews containing functional analysis of NVIDIA GPUs

On November 15, 2005 the latest drivers from NVIDIA were 81.95 for Windows XP.