NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT from Leadtek

I’m going to compare the PowerColor with the WinFast A400 GT TDH graphics card from Leadtek:

Besides the card itself, its package contained cables and adapters, a user manual, CDs with drivers and utilities and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.

If the printed-circuit board of the card from PowerColor hadn’t been red-lacquered, it would turn red with envy looking at the cooling system of the Leadtek product:

I haven’t met such a solid copper design for quite a long time. This cooler looks more impressive than the notorious FlowFX from NVIDIA, but is much quieter at work. As a finishing blow at the heart of an impressive overclocker, the Leadtek engineers put a massive copper heatsink at the backside of the board, too. It is the same as on the GeForce 6800 card we reviewed recently.

The Leadtek graphics card features the GeForce 6800 GT graphics processor from NVIDIA…

…and comes equipped with 256MB of 2ns GDDR3 memory from Samsung:

The card turned to have a good overclockability – no wonder with such a cooling system! Its standard frequencies of 350/1000MHz grew to 420/1200MHz with the standard cooling system and to 450/1200MHz with water cooling.

So, we’ve got a worthy competitor to the PowerColor card. Let’s hear what the benchmarks have to say about this pair.

Testbed and Methods

The testbed was configured as follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CPU;
• ASUS K8V-SE mainboard;
• 2x512MB TwinMOS PC3200 DDR SDRAM, CL2.5.

Software:

• Windows XP Pro SP1;
• DirectX 9.0b;
• Detonator 61.34 for the Leadtek WinFast A400 GT TDH;
• Catalyst 4.7 for PowerColor RADEON X800 Pro.

Considering the overall highest performance level of the graphics cards, I performed all the tests in the 1600x1200 resolution. In lower resolutions, even our quite powerful testbed often limited the performance of the graphics card proper: the CPU or the system at large would become the bottleneck.

The optimizations of tri-linear and anisotropic filtering on the two cards were enabled: NVIDIA offers them by default, and ATI’s control panel even doesn’t allow adjusting these optimizations – they are always enabled.