The ASUS GeForce 6800GT is a video card, based on the video processor NV40 from NVIDIA. This GPU has sixteen pixel conveyors and six top blocks. The graphical processor includes two hundred and twenty two million transistors. NVIDIA uses the130 nm technological process to produce GeForce processors. The working voltage for the ASUS GeForce 6800GT video cards is 1.3 V by default.
There are different variants of ASUS GeForce 6800GT for AGP and PCI-Express slots. Video cards, using the interface PCI Express x16, are based on the NV45 chip, which presents the chip NV40 with its bridge, built into the GPU case. This bridge performs the PCI Express support. At the same time, this implementation is much faster than its bridge, implemented as a separate chip on the card. A working clock rate of the ASUS GeForce 6800GT series is 350 MHz by default. Usually, video cards of this family are provided with the GDDR3 memory in the BGA box. The access time of such memory is 2.0 ns. This way the clock rate of the memory bus is 500(1000) MHz by default. The memory bus has 256 bit digits.
ATI and NVIDIA perform the main competition in the market of video cards. ATI provides some video cards that are comparable by their performance with the GeForce 6800GT. Officially, the Radeon X800Pro is a video card of such level. Therefore, in some games, like Doom 3 or Half-Life2, these video cards are not equal. The reason is in the usage of different technologies. For instance, UltraShadow 2 is a good help for NVIDIA cards in the Doom3 game. Additional optimizations, implemented in the applications, can also influence the superiority of some video cards. Thus, ATI cards are much better than NVIDIA ones in Half-Life 2.
The company ATI has recently released the video card Radeon X800XL. This product has a worthy performance than the GeForce 6800 GT, though it costs one hundred dollars less. That is the reason why it can be a better choice than the 6800GT.
The video chip NV40GT has a very high heat emission. Hence, you should remember about a proper cooling system. The temperatures in sixty-seventy degrees are usual for it. The video memory GDR3 in the BGA box has an average level of the heat emission. Power supply elements of the video card issue a comparatively low quantity of heat. That is the reason why all producers install a radiator, which warms up significantly at loading.
Usually, the producers of the video cards provide their own monitoring utilities, such as a V-tuner from Gigabyte or a Smart Doctor from ASUS. Complex utilities Riva Tuner and SpeedFan have more functions. They allow to control the temperature of the kernel and the temperature of the card surface. There is also a possibility to control coolers' rpms on the video card with some utilities from the producers.
There are some models of video cards with a special cooling system. As a rule, they are only the copies of the NVIDIA reference systems. A turbine of such cooling systems is very noisy, but with a driver, loading the rpms, and the noise is going lower. The temperatures with the loading can reach eighty-eighty five degrees and about fifty in the idle mode. Such cooling system is installed to their cards by the companies MSI, XFX, Chaintech, Apollo, Albatron, BFG and eVGA. Moreover, the results of the overclocking mat vary from 390 to 430-4400 MHz for video cards of different producers.
ASUS NVIDIA is a great combination of successful producers in the same line with many famous video cards.