Board appearance
Not only is ASUS' GeForce 6800 an usual card in terms of specifications, it's also visually different from any others that we've come across. As always, click on the picture to enlarge the image.
The card's appearance is far more reminiscent of a GeForce 6800 Ultra than a vanilla 6800, right down to the heatsinks on the right-hand side, placement of components, and 2 Molex power connectors. Compare it with AOpen's GeForce 6800 Ultra model and try to spot the differences. GeForce 6800 GTs make do with a single Molex connector, so it begs the question whether ASUS is being supplied with cards and cores that have failed to meet Ultra specifications. It also leads to the tantalising thought of possibly modding these cards to full Ultra spec.
ASUS has gone with separate heatsinks for GPU and RAM. You can just about spot the matching silver-coloured heatpipe on the top-right of the cooler, used to wick away the heat generated by 1GHz-rated GDDR3 memory. The back of the card can be seen here.
Shown this shot alone, most enthusiasts would wager it's an Ultra model. The only giveaway sign, just out of shot, is the low-profile GPU cooler which ensures the card doesn't take up a PCI slot. Good news for SFF PC owners.
S-Video (TV-Out), DVI and VGA are the usual suspects. Dual-DVI would have been a nice bonus. This shot also reiterates the single-slot design of the cooler. There's no VIVO functionality, unfortunately, although ASUS gets further style points by having cool blue LEDs incorporated into the cooler's fan.
Stripping away the cooling fan and RAMsink reveals a small-ish copper cooler and 8 256MBit Samsung GDDR3 memory chips, identical to the ones found on our reference GeForce 6800 GT 256MB card. ASUS's recipe has been to take parts of a vanilla 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra, combine them in a set form to create a steroid-pumped GeForce 6800. An interesting choice.
