6800gs Agp

Status
Not open for further replies.

stephen_s

Baseband Member
Messages
94
I am thinking about buying a 6800GS AGP when it comes out but I noticed on the evga and xfx websites that the core clock for both is 350mhz. The PCI express versions range from 425mhz to 485mhz. Why are the AGP versions less and will this make the card noticeably slower than its PCI express counterparts?
 
Its because the video card companies are trying to phase out AGP cards. The 6800GS can still be overclocked very well though.
 
The AGP versions of the 6800GS will be/is using a different chip than the PCI-E version.

The GeForce 6800GS for PCI Express is a respin of well-known NV41 chip with native PCI Express interface (NV41a) and 6800GS AGP is actually the original NV41, first 110nano chip for nVIDIA. The NV41 chip was also known as "6800 with working PureVideo acceleration", altough you loose one Quad (4 Pixel Processors) and a Vertex Shader. The board pretty much looks the same as any 6800 and 6800GT board with single-slot cooling, and is sharing the clock-speed with 6800GT. So, the 6800GS AGP works at 350 MHz for the 12 pipe GPU, and 1000 MHz for 256MB of GDDR-3 memory.

Altough the PCIe version of the board works at 425 MHz, the AGP version is clocked less by whole 75 MHz. If you ask yourselves why, we can't think about anything else but politics. Our guess is that nVIDIA tries to make PCI Express look better by higher clocking the PCIe products - remember 6600GT in AGP version? It had 100 MHz slower memory (same GPU clock though), and when clocked to same speeds as its PCIe board, it beated the schyte out of the PCIe product. Mostly because PCIe was Intel-only domain, and we all know how Intel gets demolished by AMD in games.

P.S. 6600GT AGP at 500/900 MHz beated 500/1000 in almost every game, so even that move didn't helped the PCI Express version.
 
I have the 500/900 6600gt agp actually. So you think the agp version will be about as fast as the pcie version?
 
Sweeeeeeeetness :)

Too bad its too late for the step-up program. Could always sell the 6600GT on eBay.
 
So you think they purposefully clocked it down to 350mhz even though it could handle much more just to encourage the pci express format?
 
So you think they purposefully clocked it down to 350mhz even though it could handle much more just to encourage the pci express format?

No. Like it was quoted above, the AGP version uses a different chip (NV41), while the PCI-E uses a derivative of it (NV41a).

The clock speeds are just the default settings. What the actuall top-end could be... who knows?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom