Gainward's Ultra/2600 450 MHz air cooled flier

We have already tested a water cooled version of this card here but we wanted to see how the air cooled baby would fare. It takes two slots as it has a massive cooler mounted on top of the card. We never experienced any stability problems on the 450MHz/1200MHz overclocked settings shipped with the card, which needs you to install its power tool utility. One thing that you will notice is that each time you start a 3D application or even a video file, the fan speed will increase. We remember this phenomenon from the 5800 series of cards. Just for the record, this card is noisier than ATI's X800XT Platinum edition but read on to see the performance scores.

We managed to run our tests at 450MHz/1200 MHz memory and the card stayed stable in all tests. We managed to overclock the memory to 1250MHz but then things got shaky. The core will not deliver much more then 450 as Gainward has an Nvidia BIOS that automatically de-clocks the card when it's pushed too hard.

The card comes in nice box and of course you will get a lot of CDs and cables and we like the red Gainwardish DVI dongle.

Don't be scared of its two power connectors but yes, you need them if you are serious about overclocking.

We used Nvidia's latest 61.77 non WHQL drivers and you have to install Gainward expert tool to clock the card to its default 450MHz/1200MHz memory.

Test
We tested with:

Athlon 64 3400+ clocked at 2200 MHz
EPOX HDA3+ K8T800 board
2x512 MB Corsair DDR 550 PC4400 CL2
Western Digital 8 MB cache 80 GB Drive
Titan Athlon 64 cooler

We ran some standard and some new graphic benchmark sets since we've seen quite a few changes in the last few months in the game market. We added Doom 3 and new 3Dmark05.

We also used a life saving program called Bench Em All that ran most of our benchmark set for us. This marvellous application can save you quite a lot of time and can speed up the review process.

As you can see from the tables above, Gainward 6800 Ultra at 450MHz wins on almost all benchmarks and the Radeon X800XT Platinum edition just cannot keep up with this card. Radeon wins all synthetic tests but it still loses in games. Not by much, but the Gainward card clocked at 450/1200 is definitely the winner.

Conclusion
We tested a water cooled version of this card few months back and it's interesting to note that we got exactly the same results. Well there is a huge difference in price. The air-cooled card that we tested today won't be very quiet while its CoolFX brother will be totally quiet. You can get some 20MHz more with the water-cooled version, but that's all. There is a €300 difference in price.

Just like its water-based brother, this card is a top performer. If you have the money to spare, then this is the card for you. If not, then go for the "cheap" $499 or even more affordable cards that won't deliver this performance.

While it will cost you almost the same as some other branded Geforce 6800 Ultra cards, you will get 450/1200 MHz performance, while most of the others will offer you 400/1100 MHz for the same price. µ