looking for info on 6800 and 7800 series cards

Hello,
I am posting in hopes of gaining some guidance on upgrading my VGA card. First, my system is AGP only, so I am pretty restricted.


I have always been a huge ATI fan, and currently have a 9800 pro (flashed as an XT) but think it may be time for an upgrade now.

I would be open to either nvidia or ATI, but have heard that the latest AGP releases from ATI are lacking in support for newer pixel shader standards. As a result I have been focusing my attention on the geforce 6800 series cards (the 7800's are just too expensive) and the whole thing has me thuroughly confused.

They have som many designations for these cards, and I can't find a single guide or chart that covers them all.

So far I have seen:

6800 GT (quite ridiculously expensive , actually the ones ive seen have been more than the 7800's)

6800 GS

6800

6800 XT

and the 6800 ultra

I guess I can assume by price that the GT is the best of the bunch, but aside from that distinction, I am quite confused. Do any of you know of a place where I can find a comaprison of the vanilla 6800, the GT, GS, XT and Ultra?

It depends a great deal on your CPU. I have a P4 3.0ghz hyperthread and it is a bottleneck with my 6800GS.

I have the BFG 6800GS and I unlocked the 4 extra pipes and overclocked it. I get great performance but the CPU is holding it back.

A 7800GS would do nothing more than a 6800GS because of this CPU bottleneck. If you have a 9800PRO/XT now then your system is probably older with an older CPU like the one I have.

I recommend the 6800GS because it's a really good card that impressed the hell out of me. However it's very picky about power so your PSU should have 18A minimum on the 12V rails and you should have a dedicated rail just for the card with nothing else attached. I made a mistake of attaching a HDD and had random lockups until I realized this.

Just my two cents.

Is your CPU the 533 or 800MHz bus? What's your 3DMark score?

In that case, the CPU is bottlenecked by the FSB.