NVIDIA’s bottom-line version of the GeForce 6800 graphics processor that was originally said to be intended for system builders and OEMs is expected to reach retail markets shortly. Leadtek, an NVIDIA’s major add-in-card partner, has already unveiled its GeForce 6800 LE graphics cards for Japanese customers.

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 GeForce 6-series of graphics processors will be eventually available across entry-level, mainstream, performance-mainstream, high-end as well as so-called ultra high-end graphics cards. 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.

So far NVIDIA has unveiled four GeForce 6800-series graphics processors: the GeForce 6800 Ultra, GeForce 6800 GT, GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6800 LE that differ by clock-speed, the number of rendering pipelines as well as type of memory they work with. The “Ultra” and “GT” models feature 16 pixel processors and 256MB of GDDR3 memory, the standard model sports 12 pipes and uses 128MB of DDR memory, the “LE” flavour boasts only 8 pixel pipelines and 128MB of memory.

When asked about the target market for the GeForce 6800 LE, an NVIDIA representative earlier this year said the “LE” was a system builder/OEM card and would not be sold in retail. However, at least one maker of graphics cards – Leadtek – has officially released the GeForce 6800 LE-based product for retail market, after a software developer accused Leadtek's partners of selling the GeForce 6800 LE “unofficially” in late August.

Leadtek WinFast A400 LE TDH

Leadtek’s GeForce 6800 LE is equipped with 128MB of memory, D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors. The graphics chip is set to operate at 300MHz, while the memory functions at 700MHz. Currently the "6800 LE" SKU from Leadtek sports only AGP 8x bus.

Pricing of the GeForce 6800 LE graphics cards remains to be seen.