Special graphic card cheap buys

USA
The BFG FX6800 is a factory overclocked card. What makes it special is its price - $249.99 at outpost- the cheapest in the US by $20. BFG cards are fully supported by BFG Tech's Lifetime Warranty and 24/7 free technical support. That particular card has an overclocked core clock of 350MHz instead of the standard 325MHz. The memory clock is an effective 700MHz. Connectors include VGA, DVI and SVideo.

The card is not a 6800LE as I would guess but a true 6800. It has 12 pipelines instead of the 16 pipelines found in GT or Ultra cards. Memory used also is GDDR instead of the GDDR3. You will even find a full copy of Far Cry in the retail box. The heat sink fan is massive with two fans and copper sinks, covering the GPU and the DDR memory. Overclocking over and above what the BFG has achieved out of the box. With the coolbits registry mod, the card can be overclocked to 374MHz and 748MHz for the core and memory respectively. Bjord 3D says of it that "The BFG 6800 OC is a sweet card that offers great performance in nearly every end of the graphics spectrum. Yes, it may not be the GT or Ultra, but it definitely holds its own.

If you do already own a GeForce 5900 series or a 9800 Pro video card, you may be more inclined to jump up a notch to the GT or Ultra or sit on your hands and wait for the next batch of cards to arrive."

UK
You can enjoy a 6800 video card in UK for only £127.65. The Gainward Powerpack Ultra/2100LE apparently has eight pipelines instead of the 12 pipelines but still keeps the 256bit memory interface. The core/speed is 300/350MHz which should probably easily overclocked as we've seen previously with the only available test of the 6800LE online, available at T-Break.

The card comes with DVI, Video Out and D-Sub. As for most Gainward cards, you get a large heatsink covering the GPU and the memory modules. At default clock speeds, the card generally hovers around the 5900/9800 generation of card but once overclocking steps in, the card approaches standard 6800 performance. In the UK, for the same price, you will get a 5900XT or a Radeon 9800 Pro. Obviously then, it would make more sense to go for the 6800LE. Who knows, there might even be some hacks available online to enable part of those pipelines.

Singapore
For S$795 at Hardwareplace, you get nab the cheapest X800 in Singapore. The Elsa Falcox X80Pro features 256Mb GDDR3 memory running at 900MHz, with a 160M transistor clock pumped a 475Mhz. Like the 6800 above, it has only 12 pipelines. The card features advanced technologies like 3Dc, videoshader, Smartshader and many other kinds of marchitecture. Again, as for most high performing graphic cards, X80Pro is endowed with a high performance heat sink fan and a distinctive enclosure for the latter. Hartware has achieved quite good overclocking with it.

Pushing it up to 545/560Mhz. At that stage it would take on the 6800GT card, shattering the 10K mark on 3dMark 2003. Finally, three games are proposed/ Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, and Counter-strike: Condition Zero. Quite a well balanced card indeed. µ