No 6800 Ultra extreme, Nvidia says

Sources close to Nvidia confirmed that the 6800 Ultra cards will remain at 400MHz since it actually can ship them in any volumes at this speed, while its 450+MHz chips will be reserved for special partners.

Special cards will be introduced by, yes, Gainward, a company that will soon be ready with its Cool FX water-cooled card clocked at over 450MHz. We suspect that it may reach over 500MHz.

Gainward is still testing its final clock speeds but we are sure that this card will be one of the fastest cards ever produced up to this point.

Another company which will do this is the ambitious XFX, which will also introduce a limited number of cards clocked at least to 450MHz for the core and close to 1200MHz for the memory. We don't have any idea about its availability.

The third partner will be US only and will be BFG. It has the green light to introduce these 450MHz cards as well.

We don't have any solid date when any of these cards will be available but Gainward should be ready to sample early next week with production in just a week or two beyond that.

In this product cycle we expect to see the Radeon X800XT Platinum water cooled producing a nice little fight, we believe. µ