Chicago (IL) - Gigabyte appears to be on a roll these days with yet another dual-GPU graphics card knocking on our doors. The most recent model will be the flagship model of the 3D1 series and come with two GeForce 6800 GT graphics chips.

Originally believed to be a niche market solution, Gigabyte's dual-GPU graphics cards apparently sell in much higher numbers than anticipated. At least sales have to be a in a range where Gigabyte's management was able to justify a third release in the series.

The GV-3D1-68GT will build on the same architecture based on Nvidia SLI technology, but integrate GeForce 6800 GT graphics chips. Compared to the previous 6600 and 6600GT cards, the newest member of the family will double the integrated GDDR3 memory to 512 MByte. Standard features include two D-SUB and two DVI-I ports for a support of two displays. The card also handles DTV and HDTV encoding with a resolution of up to 1024 x 768 pixels.

Sources from Gigabyte claim that the new card will be the best performing single-board graphics systems - at least when current scoreboards are considered. Benchmark results point to about 20,400 points in 3DMark 03 and about 9500 points in 3DMark 05.

Availability of the card is expected for the end of July or beginning of August of this year. There were no details on pricing of the card, but sources said that the GV-3D1-68G will cost about 10 to 15 percent less than two 6800 GT cards in a package. Current 6800 GT's fetch about $400 in stores, so we would take a guess that Gigabyte will aim at a price tag of about $680 to $700.

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