Thoughts
GALAXY has gone about the design of its GeForce 6800 line in stark contrast to most manufacturers and partners. Recruiting Arctic Cooling, purveyors of high-quality cooling, was the first step towards a non-reference design. The oversized VGA silencer carries the two-fold benefit of reducing core temperature and fan speed. GALAXY's obviously confident enough with Arctic Cooling's efforts to warrant a 15/25MHz (depending on whether you consider 325MHz or 335MHz the default 6800 speed) increase over reference models. GALAXY Technology also adds in some super-fast Hynix DDR1 RAM, rated to a nominal 900MHz, yet chooses to go with NVIDIA's 700MHz RAM speed recommendations.Careful cooling and wise component selection makes GALAXY's vanilla 6800 amongst the best of the current bunch. A stable, overclocked speed of 435MHz core and 835MHz RAM is testament enough to the sample's prowess. A couple of decent games also boost the package's attractiveness. An asking price of £215 puts it in line with most other 6800s currently available, although XFX's is priced at around £40 less. Whether it's worth it or not depends upon each user's preferred game settings. At moderate resolutions and with reasonable image enhancement GALAXY's card does well enough. However, dialling up the load intensity highlights the shortcomings inherent in a 128MB card design.
If you can scrape together the extra £75 necessary to purchase a GT model, I'd recommend it, especially with newer gaming titles using huge textures that necessitate larger frame buffers. If ~£200 is your absolute limit, GALAXY's Glacier GeForce 6800 is a fine choice. It's a quiet, pre-overclocked, balanced all-around package.
