Power (cont’d) and the 6800 GT

To test our 12V rail theory out, I installed the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme in my personal system. It’s an Epox KT333-based motherboard with an Athlon XP 2100+, 512MB DDR266 memory, SB Live!, Promise RAID controller card, and 3Com 10/100 NIC. I also have my system outfitted with four hard drives, a DVD-ROM drive, and a CD-R/RW burner (for those of you who were wondering, I’ve been running it with a RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB).

On the power side, the real gem is the Enermax Whisper Quiet EG365P-VE PSU I purchased over a year ago to go with my Cooler Master aluminum case (it’s one of the later model ATC-110 series cases with exhaust/intake fans, before they messed it all up with the Wavemaster line). This PSU is only 350 watts total, but capable of delivering up to 26A on the 12V rail, four amps more than the Antec TruePower I bought at Fry’s a few weeks ago for the 6800 Ultra test bed.

As theorized in our 6800 Ultra preview article, the system ran flawlessly with this setup. 3DMark 03, Call of Duty, and UT 2004 all ran with complete stability on a 350-watt power supply with GeForce 6800 Ultra. Clearly, NVIDIA’s 480-watt PSU recommendation errs on the side of extreme caution, as a high quality sub-$50 350W PSU like the Enermax EG365P-VE can be used with no problems.

If you plan on pairing the GeForce 6800 Ultra with a Prescott 3.4GHz (or faster) and multiple drives however, it may not be a bad idea to upgrade to a high quality 400-watt PSU. Just avoid the generic brands, and as we mentioned in Alan’s power supply guide, always check the figures on the 12V rail.

Top of the GeForce 6800 GT board

The bottom of the card

The GeForce 6800 GT card

NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT is based on the single-slot cooling design we mentioned in our GeForce 6800 Ultra Performance Preview.

Dual slot versus single slot cooling

Note the shiny heat pipe nestled between the heatsinks fins

Only one Molex is required for GeForce 6800 GT

This is another heat pipe solution that ships with a slimmer, quieter cooling fan. Like the GeForce 6800 Ultra, the heatsink is long, encompassing nearly the entire board. The heatsink is constructed of aluminum and is responsible for keeping the heat pipe and memory modules cool.

Our GeForce 6800 GT is an A02 board, not needing the DVI transmitters that are silk-screened on both sides of its PCB. Since the reference board sports one VGA and one DVI connector, the board relies on the internal transmitter instead.

The power requirements for the GeForce 6800 GT are considerably tamer than the Ultra board. NVIDIA hasn’t come up with a final wattage figure on the PSU, but since power requirements are similar to the 5900 Ultra, they claim a PSU in the 300-watt range should be sufficient for the 6800 GT (of course, our own testing reveals that it’s not show much about wattage as it is the amount of power available on the 12V rail). Because of this, the GeForce 6800 GT board only requires one Molex connector for providing juice to the board.