Yeah I replaced the 8800gt's cooler with an S1. I've been using the S1 and S2 for years on a few cards. I like the cheap fanless cooling.

I've wanted the top FX card for a long time because I think NV's DX9 failure there is fascinating. But the card I got had dieing horrid 40mm fans. A common occurrence with the cheap fans they used back then.

According to Wikipedia, there was also a 6800 Ultra Extreme. Not sure if it was released though.

Svenne wrote:

According to Wikipedia, there was also a 6800 Ultra Extreme. Not sure if it was released though.

Please reference the top post in the thread. The Ultra Extreme was released but only in limited numbers, buyers were typically chosen by lottery. eVGA is the only card maker that I can confirm that made them. I read that Gainward was planning a 6800 Ultra that was even faster, (550 core, 1300 memory are supposed to be achievable) but that one was liquid cooled with a projected price of around 800 Euros. I don't know if any were released. $550 USD for the eVGA one was expensive enough, 800 Euros would have been an outrageous price that not many would have been willing or able to pay. I have also read rumors of a possible XFX Ultra Extreme, but never seen even a picture of one. The GPU's had to be hand picked and tested from the ordinary 6800 Ultras which is a time consuming and labor intensive process which is why these limited edition cards with super overclocks are so expensive.

It's funny, though, because every reference I see for the 6800 Ultra Extreme says they were released only in PCIe but I have yet to see a PCIe version, only AGP which nobody mentions.

Oops, sorry. I misread it as only "6800 Ultra".

The Ultra Extreme was one of those reactionary products. NV wanted to equate to X800XT PE which came out after 6800 U. ATI was killing 6800 U in a few games but losing in others especially OpenGL games.

The 6800Ultra Extreme is not an official product released by nvidia, but an overclocked version by a few manufacturers.

noshutdown wrote:

The 6800Ultra Extreme is not an official product released by nvidia, but an overclocked version by a few manufacturers.

So it's basically an overclocked card with warranty. But still, some may find it have some collector value.

noshutdown wrote:

The 6800Ultra Extreme is not an official product released by nvidia, but an overclocked version by a few manufacturers.

But only a very small percentage of all the 6800 Ultra cores produced are able to reach those speeds. Some of the regular cards made before they started handpicking the chips might be overclockable to those speeds, but it's a crap shoot. You might get lucky, but most likely you won't. The Extreme branded ones are guaranteed to run at those speeds, and possibly a little more with overclocking and they come with a warranty. Not that warranties really matter because most people just use softmods like RivaTuner to overclock/unlock their cards without BIOS flashing so if it burned up they could still RMA it because it would default back to the factory settings on reboot without leaving any evidence of tampering behind.

Guess what? I had a reason for creating this thread and now that it has arrived, I can confess. I actually found one of these on ebay recently, and had very little competition bidding for it. I try not to allow people the chance to make side deals with my sellers before they have a chance to ship it to me, so I wait until I receive shipping confirmation to say anything. Here's the listing

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem … e=STRK:MEWNX:IT

And it comes with an Innovatek waterblock that has never been used. 😁

Cool. Make sure to play some Doom3 or Quake4 on it because that stencil shadowing stuff is what NV40 was designed for. 😁