Board analysis

Higher clocks

While NVIDIA is handling all early GeForce 6800 Ultra board production themselves, board partners such as Leadtek do have the option of making some modifications to their cards. In fact, it seems as if NVIDIA’s board partners have been given more leeway as of late with their high-end $400+ cards, especially in the realm of clock speeds.

Front of the Leadtek card

The back of the card

Typically when a new GPU is introduced, NVIDIA provides little or no flexibility in allowing board partners to deviate from the reference clock speeds for their first crop of cards. Clock speed adjustment usually doesn’t occur until the second or third generation of cards hits retail, when board partners are desperate for new ways to distinguish themselves from each other (and their own first generation cards). Keep in mind that this statement applies to flagship card offerings, for their $300 cards, NVIDIA’s board partners are able to produce their own cards, and typically come up with some pretty innovative designs.

This seems to have changed with GeForce 6800 Ultra, as many of NVIDIA’s board partners have been allowed to overclock their boards from the factory, providing their card with more performance than your typical stock GeForce 6800 Ultra. With Leadtek’s core audience being gamers and enthusiasts, it was only natural that they decided to overclock their WinFast A400 Ultra TDH by default.

Leadtek has chosen to bump up the core clock frequency to 425MHz, an improvement of 25MHz over the stock GeForce 6800 Ultra core clock. This nets the card an additional 6% in peak fill rate. Meanwhile, on the memory side, the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH’s memory speed is unchanged at 550MHz (1.1GHz effective).

By overclocking the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH out of the box, Leadtek provides a factory-backed overclocked solution for the gamer who wants a little more performance than stock, with the peace of mind of remaining under warranty. Enthusiasts who really want to push their hardware can still overclock their card manually via NVIDIA’s Coolbits utility.

Copper cooling

The second area where Leadtek deviates from other GeForce 6800 Ultras is in the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH’s cooling. Whereas NVIDIA’s stock 6800 Ultra cooler is aluminum-based, with a heatpipe sitting over the memory modules for increased cooling, Leadtek has decided to integrate their own cooling design that’s composed entirely of copper on the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH.

Copper heatsink cools memory and GPU

Card with the cooler removed

Bottom heatsink cools the back of the card

Leadtek outfits their card with a massive copper heatsink covering the NV40 core and its memory modules, while a second copper heatsink sits on the bottom of the card. Leadtek then mounts their Air Surround cooling fan on top of all this.

Air Surround is Leadtek’s ducted fan design system. It works by drawing in air from within your case, spreading it across the main copper heatsink. Hot air then exits out the sides of this heatsink. Leadtek then tops the fan off with a dust filter. This is handy for keeping dust out of the fan’s motor, causing it to die prematurely and can be easily removed (for cleaning) with a small Phillip’s screwdriver.

In operation, Leadtek’s cooler runs about 5 decibels quieter than NVIDIA’s reference dual-slot cooler design, but unfortunately this comes at a cost: temperature. We noted temperatures 9 degrees higher on the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH card than a reference GeForce 6800 Ultra running at the same 425MHz clock speed. (45 degrees idle for the reference card, versus 54 degrees Celsius for Leadtek, 58 degrees under load for NVIDIA, 67 degrees running the same load with the Leadtek card). Perhaps if Leadtek cranked up the RPMs so that their noise level matched that of the NVIDIA reference card the temperatures would be a little closer.

Software bundle and accessories

Leadtek offers a pretty solid bundle with the WinFast A400 Ultra TDH. Included in the box are copies of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (shipped on DVD) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, GunMetal, Big Mutha Truckas, Winfox II, Cult3D, and DVD player software. Hardware accessories include two power adapters with extra Molex connectors, two DVI adapters, an S-Video cable and a component cable for outputting to an HDTV.