Leadtek PX6800 GS Extreme

Overclocking:

We overclocked the Leadtek GeForce 6800 GS Extreme video card using RivaTuner in order to give you an idea of how much headroom there is in this pre-overclocked GeForce 6800 GS. The default clock speeds are 485/1100MHz and we were able to increase these to 515/1171MHz without any problems whatsoever. Of course, your mileage may vary, as overclocking is always a bit of a lottery.

This allowed us to enjoy a smooth gameplay experience in Quake 4 at 1280x1024 2xAA 4xAF with high quality in-game details. The average frame rate was 46 frames per second, while the minimum frame rate was a respectable 18 frames per second when the card was overclocked. By comparison, the card was only able to return a 43 frames per second average and a minimum of 11 frames per second when it was running at its default speeds.

Value:

We found the Leadtek PX6800 GS Extreme for sale on Scan - it's currently selling at £165.89 including VAT. We had a look around at competing cards, with the direct comparison being XFX's GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition as it comes clocked at the same speeds as Leadtek's GS Extreme. It is priced slightly higher at £178.14 inc VAT.

Overclockers UK have the PowerColor Radeon X850XT for sale at £152.69 including VAT - that's the cheapest we've found a Radeon X850XT available for. We've been told by OcUK's purchasing manager that they've got plenty of stock in, too. Also, both GECUBE and Connect3D have Radeon X850XT cards selling for around £165 on Ebuyer.

Final Thoughts...

Leadtek's GeForce 6800 GS implementation is a good one, and we're glad to see that they've included a good bundle and that little bit extra to set themselves apart from other board partners. We were impressed to find that the card performed closer to a GeForce 6800 Ultra than a GeForce 6800 GT and it was noticeably faster than any GeForce 6800 GS running at reference clock speeds.

It held up very well against ATI's Radeon X850XT with only F.E.A.R. being a slight worry. The performance difference in Battlefield 2 didn't make all that much difference to the gameplay experience, as we were merely increasing subtle in-game details rather than adding extra antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, which tend to be a little bit more noticeable.

The question is whether you'd pay an extra £13 for the Leadtek GeForce 6800 GS over PowerColor's X850XT. I guess it depends whether you are looking to use things like HDR in games that use the FP16 blend technique - that's something you can't do on ATI's Radeon X850XT. The Radeon doesn't support Shader Model 3.0 either. That may not make much of a difference now, but it could prove to make some differences later down the line.

There is also ATI's generally poor OpenGL performance - something that they have openly admitted. However, we've been assured that the Catalyst team are dedicated to working on improving their OpenGL performance, but we're not quite sure when we'll see the driver fixed, as there has been talk of fixing the OpenGL driver for over 6 months now.

If you're a Quake 4 player and are looking for a video card in this price range today, I could only recommend Leadtek's GeForce 6800 GS Extreme - it performed head and shoulders above its competitors. HDR also seems to generally run better on NVIDIA's hardware at this time, and Source is one of those game engines that you can't ignore. NVIDIA has the upper hand here too, with Leadtek's 6800 GS Extreme capable of playing the game at a higher detail setting.

HDR is going to be an important part of games development over the next year or so and many game developers are implementing it in such a way that it is not useable on ATI's ageing Radeon X850XT. The Radeon X850XT will not be ignored for a long while and games will continue to support shader model 2.0 for a few years yet, especially when you consider that DirectX 7.0 hardware was only recently dropped by Monolith - the developers of F.E.A.R..

However, developers are likely to spend less time thinking about Shader Model 2.0 when both ATI and NVIDIA have Shader Model 3.0 hardware available to purchase today - games will be coded in Shader Model 3.0 and then other profiles will be created as fall backs for older hardware once the primary code path has been completed. Unfortunately for ATI, there's nothing in their Radeon X1000-series that fits into this price bracket at the moment - we hope that will change soon, as it's quite a crucial price point that can deliver some excellent performance for the price.