NV42 chip
0.11 micron architecture
160 million transistors
12 pixel pipelines
5 Vertex Shader Pipelines
490MHz Core Clock Speed
1300MHz Memory Clock Speed
DirectX 9.0c
Pixel Shader 3.0
Vertex Shader 3.0
HDR
SLI
SLI AA
OpenGL 2.0
NVIDIA introduced the NV4x architecture in April of 2004 at a launch party
in San Francisco. The GeForce 6800 Ultra was a beast at the time of launch,
beign the first chipset to support Shader Model 3.0, have over 200 million transistors,
and really brought NVIDIA back into the high-end video card arena they’ve
been missing out on since the launch of the 5800 Ultra in February 2003.
Whenever NVIDIA releases a new video card they tend to have a top to bottom
lineup of cards to complement the card. In the NV4x case, there was a 6800 Ultra,
a 6800GT, a 6800, a 6800GS, a 6800XT, a 6600GT, a 6600, a 6200, a 6200 with
Turbo Cache and many variants of these cards. The 6800GS CO Superclocked is
based upon the NV42 chip. Reference 6800GS cards are clocked at 350/1GHz core/memory
speeds. The Superclocked card is clocked at 490MHz/1.1GHz speeds.
I’ve already covered the major features of the 6800 series in various
reviews both on this site and Motherboards.org. The key features of the 6800GS
CO Superclocked include 12 Pixel Shader pipelines, 5 Vertex Shader pipelines.
With a 490MHz core clock, this gives the card almost a 6 Gigapixel fillrate
theorectical. The memory bandwidth on the card is more than the previous generation’s
high end card had.
SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface. The first consumer video card company
to market multiple video cards to improve gaming performance was 3DFX with their
Voodoo 2 SLI boards. Technology in video cards was such that the biggest feature
of the cards at the time was multitexturing. In 2004 NVIDIA reintroduced SLI,
this time with the 6800 series. The 6800GS CO Superclocked is capable of SLI.
The EVGA 6800CO Superclocked is clocked by default at 490MHz for the core and
1.35GHz for the memory. Using Coolbits, I was able to stably overclock the card
to 529MHz for the core and 1.18GHz for the memory, almost a 10% overclock. The
card ran stably through the barrage of tests with no heat problems at the overclock
speed. At this speed, the card should compete against the bigger 7800 cards
in many situations.
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