Apples to Oranges

Since we know many of our readers still like standard timedemo benchmarks, we've included a couple we felt would be interesting since both ATI and NVIDIA claim certain games are "designed" to run best on their hardware. was used with the program's default timedemos.

Doom 3

If running Doom 3 benchmarks are your thing, the NX6800GT will make you very happy. In a single card environment, the 6800GT is clearly faster than the X850XT-PE. In SLI mode, we're seeing 4xAA/8xAF numbers at 1600x1200 that are very close to the X850XT-PE's no AA/AF 1280x1024 numbers.

Half-Life 2

For Half-Life 2 benchmarkers, ATI hardware still runs supreme. In SLI mode, the NX6800GT's performance is very consistent across all resolutions and IQ settings, but still can catch up to the X800XT, let alone the X850XT-PE.

We would like to remind you that benchmarks don't really tell the whole story though as actual gameplay experience is more or less the same, as it should be considering how much these parts cost.

Image Quality

No AA/AF	4xAA/8xAF

No AA/AF	4xAA/8xAF

At 1600x1200 resolutions, games looked fantastic. There isn't much improvement visually with AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled unless you're in an open area. For some games, such as Doom 3, we suggest leaving AA and AF off altogether as the game is simply too dark to benefit from it. 2D quality was also good, with black text on white backgrounds being quite readable at 1680x1050 resolution on my Dell widescreen LCD.

Overclocking and Cooling

MSI includes their Dynamic Overclocking Technology (D.O.T) utility to overclock the NX6800GT and it has six options to improve the clock speeds up to a maximum of 10%. We chose to do things the traditional way though and used the Coolbits registry edit to unlock our options.

By default (with the UltraGear running at 2800RPM), the card runs at 350MHz GPU and 1GHz memory. Leaving the UltraGear at the lowest setting (2800RPM), we stabilized the card at 405MHz/1.2GHz. We were able to get the GPU a little higher, but we witnessed 2D image corruption which only went away at 405MHz GPU.

At 4000RPM, the GPU settled at 410MHz, with no further improvements to the memory. Under full load (a BenchemAll! script will do that), the card hit a toasty 77°C. At 2800RPM, the card ran at 88°C. Stock GPU/Memory speeds kept the card at 82°C at 2800RPM.

Final Words

By itself, the MSI NX6800GT-T2D256E is a very solid offering for those looking to upgrade themselves from a DirectX 8 video card. While it's not based on NVIDIA's flagship 6800 Ultra, the 6800GT offers everything feature-wise that the Ultra does at a much lower cost. While some may have bemoaned the fact that we compared the 6800GT to ATI's top offering, based on our test results, the NX6800GT offers a lot of performance at about $100 less and performs at par or better than ATI's best in some games. In addition, the NX6800GT can be paired with another for SLI and for serious gamers who either cannot find or afford the 6800 Ultra, the NX6800GT in SLI mode is quite the beast.

We've gone over some concerns about SLI before, but to summarize, don't expect SLI to work wonders with all games. The support list is growing, but unless you're a fan of 3D action and adventure games, SLI is probably not for you. As much as we think the NX6800GT provides good value, having two of them is not for those on a budget. Now, to put aside the obvious, the X850XT Platinum is still faster than SLI in some games but other than the fact the hardware is hard to find, it is also very expensive. Two 6800GTs aren't exactly cheap either, so it'll be wise to look over your game collection and decide the optimal upgrade path.

For actual gameplay, we'd be hard pressed to tell you which card "felt" the slowest, but if you really needed an opinion, Far Cry was the only game we felt suffered a bit under a single NX6800GT run. Most of the game felt fine while playing it, but there was some slow downs while battling those monsters with the rocket launchers on their shoulders.

In all fairness, we didn't look at the flagship 6800 Ultra, so keep that in mind when looking over our results with the ATI X850XT-PE numbers. In doing so, it should be clear that the MSI NX6800GT-T2D256E is a good performer and should be sufficient with most of today's games. With room to grow (AKA, SLI), for those of you sporting nForce4 SLI boards from AMD or Intel, you should be set until we see the next major refresh of video hardware.

Pros: Good performance, even better in SLI mode. CopperUltra and UltraGear. Relatively quiet at low fan settings.

Cons: Expensive (but less so than high-end offerings), SLI may not be supported with your favorite games.

Bottom Line: By itself, the 6800GT is fully capable of providing an enjoyable gaming experience at high quality and resolution. There are faster cards out there than the MSI NX6800GT, and in some games, SLI is not much faster than a lone X800XT or Radeon X850XT-PE. However, SLI is the way to go if budget be damned and you really need the extra speed a second card can afford.