Thread: MSI GeForce NX6800 Ultra card

As you may have guessed from its name, MSI's Geforce NX6800 Ultra is the first retail card we have seen based on Nvidia's new high-end graphics core, the 6800 Ultra. Code-named NV40, the 6800 Ultra is the first of the new NV4x family, which offers big performance gains over the previous high-end core, the FX5950 Ultra. The new 0.13 micron core is huge, with an astonishing 222 million transistors; to give you an idea of how impressive that is for a graphics core, Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition has a mere 178 million transistors, 149 million of which make up the L2 cache, the core itself having only 29 million.



As with ATi's new wonder chip, the R420, the 6800 Ultra uses 256MB of DDR3 memory, all of which sits on the front of the board which allows even more to be added to the rear of the card in the future. Although the Samsung memory chips are rated up to 600MHz, the ones on MSI's board are clocked at 550MHz DDR (1.1GHz) which, when added to the core's running speed of 400MHz, gives an impressive memory bandwidth of 35.2GB/s.