Review by Steve Angelly - January 16, 2006

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARK RESULTS

Synthetic benchmarks have been a consistent subject of debate as far as the results providing a benefit for gamers. My reasoning for using such benchmarks is that they provide a good initial insight in determining the stability settings/timings that I want to use in a particular system and that, in itself, is an indicator of potential gaming performance.

In this review, I am using these benchmarks to provide a visual result of the capability of the XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition performance in frames per second (FPS) or in the case of 3DMark2003 and 2005, the indicated performance displayed as '3DMarks'. No, the results do not reflect the capability of playing specific games, however, such benchmarks do provide an indication of potential performance under severe stress revealing level of stability at certain settings.

AquaMark3

I have used this benchmarks mainly for testing stability in overclocking graphic card ram but in general AM3 provides very good stress tests of system components. The slightest hint of sprites in a frame is a good indicator of instability of ram timings and the need to back off on the overclock. Any artifacts usually indicates too much of an overclock on the CPU or GPU. Of course, there are other factors to consider but in general these are basic indicators of initially what to look for if problem solving is required.

As expected, the GeForce 6800 GS combo in SLI show their strength over the single card at higher settings and resolutions. A better than 18% frames per second (FPS) improvement at 1280x1024 with no antialiasing (AA), 4x anisotropic filtering (AF) compared to under 4% FPS increase at 1024x768. Almost the same results are achieved when adding 4xAA/16xAF at the same resolution of 1280x1024.

The XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition is not to be denied achieving over 70 FPS at 1024x768 and right at 60 FPS at 1280x1024, both very respectable results in this benchmark for a GeForce 6800 Series card.

3DMark2003

The SLI scored better than 23% higher at the benchmark default setting of 1024x768 resolution and better than 25% at 1280x1024 than the single card. At 1600x1200 the difference jumped to over 33%.

3DMark2005

In sight of 10K running SLI, not bad, not bad at all! Especially if you consider these cards are currently carrying a street price of around $200. The XFX GeForce 6800 GS XXX Edition scored a respectable 5,753 with the default benchmark settings and led the way in SLI by increasing the score almost 40%.