X-bit labs

NVIDIA Ships “No Compromise” Chip for DTR Notebooks.

Category: Mobile

by Anton Shilov

[ 02/26/2005 | 11:14 PM ]

NVIDIA Corp. started shipments of its top-performing mobile graphics processing unit dubbed GeForce Go 6800 Ultra aiming desktop replacement (DTR) notebooks. The chip was originally announced in November, 2004, but is only now adopted in a commercial product.

“The GeForce Go 6800 Ultra mobile GPU was designed specifically for hard core enthusiasts,” said Rob Csongor, general manager of mobile business at NVIDIA.

The GeForce Go 6800 is a specially-designed code-named NV41M flavour of the desktop GeForce 6800 graphics processor made using 0.13 micron process technology at IBM’s East Fishkill facility. The mobile chip aimed at DTR laptops has 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex pipelines and features either 128- or 256-bit DDR or GDDR3 memory interface. NVIDIA can ship a number of the GeForce 6800 Go versions: with graphics processing unit (GPU) clock-speeds vary from 275MHz to 450MHz and memory frequencies differ from 400MHz to 600MHz. The one with GPU clocked at 450MHz and memory operating at 550MHz is specifically branded as GeForce Go 6800 Ultra.

The NVIDIA GeForce 6800-series of chips unveiled in mid-April are the company’s flagship products in the GeForce 6-series of graphics processors. The new series of NVIDIA’s graphics processors is the company’s second generation lineup of DirectX 9.0-compatible offerings that greatly leverage the feature-set of NVIDIA GeForce FX graphics chips and brings important additional capabilities, such as Shader Model 3.0, as well as great performance improvements over the previous generation hardware.

The GeForce Go 6800 builds-in PureVideo, a logic intended to boost performance and quality of video on notebooks. It is unclear, however, whether PureVideo has anything to do with NVIDIA’s highly-acclaimed GeForce 6 programmable video processor. Additionally, NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 features PowerMizer 5.0 technology to reduce power consumption of the GPU; while actual power consumption figures are not officially announced, some sources claim that the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra has TDP of 65W. NVIDIA’s NV41M, unlike the original NV40 chip, features native PCI Express interconnection.

Benchmarks by independent reviewers, such as AnandTech web-site, show that the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra is nearly as powerful as the desktop-oriented GeForce 6800 Ultra and is typically faster compared to the GeForce 6800 GT. It is unclear how performance of NVIDIA’s latest DTR graphics solution compares to ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON X800.

NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra is immediately available in Dell Inspiron XPS Gen2 17” notebook powered by Intel’s latest 915GM core-logic and Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz or 2.13GHz processors. Pricing of the notebook starts at $2249 with discounts.