That's very nice, especially for a P3! 😀

How's it setup for cooling? (That's the first thing that always comes to mind on reports of instability).

Alternately - which revision/version of the 6800 is it? If I remember right nVidia "re-released" the 6800 chips after a while for some in-line production changes (NV40->NV45->NV48); perhaps one side of that is more compatible with older hardware?

Cooling's fine, especially in the P3. Actually, all cards run much cooler in the P3 machine. Combination of not being driven as hard, plus the CPU itself dumps less than half the heat of the A64.

This particular card is an NV40, which I just learned is a true AGP GPU. Huh. For some reason I thought all AGP GF6 cards were bridged. I guess that might explain the stability. I'm going to have to find my BFG card and see if it's one of the newer NV45/48 revisions.
Edit: I guess it wouldn't be, since it looks like NV45/48 used an AGP to PCIe bridge, and therefore were only used on PCIe boards.

Now if only I could get the 2D performance up to the level of the ATI cards. 😢

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Cooling's fine, especially in the P3. Actually, all cards run much cooler in the P3 machine. Combination of not being driven as […]
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Cooling's fine, especially in the P3. Actually, all cards run much cooler in the P3 machine. Combination of not being driven as hard, plus the CPU itself dumps less than half the heat of the A64.

This particular card is an NV40, which I just learned is a true AGP GPU. Huh. For some reason I thought all AGP GF6 cards were bridged. I guess that might explain the stability. I'm going to have to find my BFG card and see if it's one of the newer NV45/48 revisions.
Edit: I guess it wouldn't be, since it looks like NV45/48 used an AGP to PCIe bridge, and therefore were only used on PCIe boards.

Now if only I could get the 2D performance up to the level of the ATI cards. 😢

GeForce 6 is an odd duck; the 6800s are native AGP and bridge to PCIe (supposedly the bridge is more similar to "AGP 12x" or something though), whiel the 6600s are PCIe and bridge to AGP. I would expect the 6800s to be more compatible with older AGP boards as a result.

Well, just ran into my first NVIDIA-VIA bug with the EVGA board. Tried to run Final Reality to measure the card's 2D speed and the screen just exploded into a flickering, colorful mess. Luckily it didn't bring the entire system down like previous attempts with NV have--hitting esc brought it back to a completely useable state. Hope this is the only bug I find--I'd really like to keep using an NV GPU in this thing. CPU overhead is wonderfully low--even better than the 9800P in most cases.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Well, just ran into my first NVIDIA-VIA bug with the EVGA board. Tried to run Final Reality to measure the card's 2D speed and the screen just exploded into a flickering, colorful mess. Luckily it didn't bring the entire system down like previous attempts with NV have--hitting esc brought it back to a completely useable state. Hope this is the only bug I find--I'd really like to keep using an NV GPU in this thing. CPU overhead is wonderfully low--even better than the 9800P in most cases.

I too had garbled display when I ran it initially. But then it went away, don't know how. Initially I thought it was because of the high destop resolution which I presumed got resolved after changing to 800x600. But now I didn't get the garbles even with resolution set to 1920x1080 and unable to trap the fault again. IIRC, during the robots test no landscape or textures were visible,only the light rays moving around were visible. Have you tried running the benchmark both individually as well as completely? Maybe it is due to some nvidia control panel setting or directx issue. It is really a wonderful benchmark.

It was the driver. I downgraded to some random Forceware 100 driver and it ran the benchmark.

The 2D speed is fine--pretty much identical to the 9800, according to Final Reality. But it certainly looks as if it's measuring 2D performance from within a D3D environment, if that makes any sense. I think 2D GUI performance is a completely different thing, and that's an area in which the 9800 excelled. Browsing the Internet even feels slower with the 6800GT. Scrolling isn't as smooth and pages seem to take a little longer to draw to the screen. When I minimize full screen applications I can see it quickly "paint" the desktop from top to bottom. None of this happens with the 9800 (or any other ATI card, including modern bridged ones like the x1950 Pro)

I think I can live with it though. Now that MS is done with XP, this rig will be unplugged from the net most of the time, making 2D Windows performance matter even less. And the D3D performance is groovy baby, yeah!

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Browsing the Internet even feels slower with the 6800GT. Scrolling isn't as smooth and pages seem to take a little longer to draw to the screen. When I minimize full screen applications I can see it quickly "paint" the desktop from top to bottom. None of this happened with the 9800 (or any other ATI card, including modern bridged ones like the x1950 Pro)

That doesn't sound right - I'm not trying to come off like a fanboy, but I never experienced those kinds of problems with my 6800GT, and do not experience them with my FX 5800 Ultra (I still have the 6800, but it's not installed in anything right now) or later nVidia cards. Even the MX 4000 PCI card I used to use for a third monitor with my Radeon 4870X2 was impossible to pick apart until you started up a game (and I was kind of bummed when I moved to Windows 7 and that display went black; out the card came 😢). 😕

I'd try an older driver (FW100 is quite modern for GeForce 6), or look at other possible changes like Windows' visual effects settings or similar.

Note that I'd be saying the exact same thing for Radeon - I've never experienced the above with my VE, 9600, or 9700 either, and would assert that they're pretty much indeterminate from one another when just drawing Windows or other 2D stuff - the differences really only manifest in 3D.

obobskivich wrote:

That doesn't sound right - I'm not trying to come off like a fanboy, but I never experienced those kinds of problems with my 6800GT, and do not experience them with my FX 5800 Ultra (I still have the 6800, but it's not installed in anything right now) or later nVidia cards. Even the MX 4000 PCI card I used to use for a third monitor with my Radeon 4870X2 was impossible to pick apart until you started up a game (and I was kind of bummed when I moved to Windows 7 and that display went black; out the card came 😢). 😕

I'd try an older driver (FW100 is quite modern for GeForce 6), or look at other possible changes like Windows' visual effects settings or similar.

Note that I'd be saying the exact same thing for Radeon - I've never experienced the above with my VE, 9600, or 9700 either, and would assert that they're pretty much indeterminate from one another when just drawing Windows or other 2D stuff - the differences really only manifest in 3D.

NVIDIA cards work just fine on nForce and Intel chipsets. There was no problem with Windows GUI speed when I tested the 6800GT in the nForce-based A64 3700 setup. This is purely a VIA AGP controller issue, and the problem is not limited to 693/4 PIII chipsets. I've seen the sluggish 2D even on Core 2 era VIA chipsets. For some reason ATI cards are unaffected.

That's why I was so surprised to find that D3D was so stable and fast. The GeForce 6/7 cards I attempted to use with this board in the past not only suffered from poor GUI performance, but also from temperamental 3D. My guess is that the EVGA card has a different (likely older) BIOS on it.

Apparently VIA's A64 and late model AXP chipsets work just fine with NVIDIA cards, but I've never used one. All I know is that all of the Socket 370, 462, and 478/775 VIA chipsets I've used have had trouble of some kind with NVIDIA cards newer than the GeForce 4.

Interesting. The only VIA chipset I've ever used was a KT400A for an AthlonXP, and while it had no real issues, I wasn't very impressed with the motherboard overall.

It's pretty easy to quantify the slower GDI performance on VIA AGP. I did some tests with the Tom2D benchmark and WinXP on nForce2, VIA K8T800 and 815 years ago. It's not so slow that it raises instant alarms when you are on a VIA mobo, but if you use other chipsets a lot, you might start to notice it. Minimizing and re-opening windows, etc. There's a slight lag there.

However, Standard Def Steve is I think seeing something more extreme. I've read that some NV GPUs sometimes drop back to an unaccelerated GDI state on some VIA boards. It can happen with ATI too if their SmartGART driver function doesn't work properly.

I've experienced this on piii machines with via chipsets and nvidia cards, such as riva tnt2 m64. It starts happening at around 1280x1024 and becomes really really obvious at 1600x1200 and above.
It depends on what cpu you have installed.
So I think the gui is totally unaccelerated. 😉

I tried my 6800 GT on a P3 with VIA Apollo chipset and installed the drivers fine, when I tried to launch a game, the whole screen went black but I could hear the game sound, when I restarted the OS was in 640x480 4 bit color VGA mode, card was identified in device manager but when I tried to reinstall drivers, it said that I did not have any Nvidia card in my system! When I went to boot in safe mode it hanged at loading agp440.sys ! had to format the whole system, I remeber also having blue screens with an FX 5200, but I think in this one was a power supply problem since It cant handle a X1950 GT.

Still this card is the best I ever had, I have bad memories of "upgrading" a 6800 GT to an HD 2600 XT 512 MB and performance was worse in all games except heavy shader ones and took a beating in Doom 3, also the HD had lots of errors with old OGL games and zbuffer issues.
I exchanged the HD for an X1950 GT 256 MB and the 6800 GT still outperformed it in OpenGL games, and the X1950 still had issues with texture alignment in some OGL games, poor 16 bit color dithering and a few glitches altough it was better than the HD 2600 in performance and compatibility.

I learned how crap ATI/AMD cards really are the hard way and it seems that they still haven't fixed these issues, OGL performance is so embarrasing for AMD but lucky for them there are not many modern GL games and nobody includes them in reviews so nobody notices it.

swaaye wrote:

It's pretty easy to quantify the slower GDI performance on VIA AGP. I did some tests with the Tom2D benchmark and WinXP on nForce2, VIA K8T800 and 815 years ago. It's not so slow that it raises instant alarms when you are on a VIA mobo, but if you use other chipsets a lot, you might start to notice it. Minimizing and re-opening windows, etc. There's a slight lag there.

However, Standard Def Steve is I think seeing something more extreme. I've read that some NV GPUs sometimes drop back to an unaccelerated GDI state on some VIA boards. It can happen with ATI too if their SmartGART driver function doesn't work properly.

Now that's what I call 2D benchmarking!
Just did a Tom2D run on both systems.

Pentium III @ 1585MHz - Radeon 9800 Pro:

Pentium III @ 1585MHz - GeForce 6800 GT:

Athlon 64 3700+ - GeForce 6800 GT:

I found another area where the 9800 pulls far ahead of the 6800GT - Final Reality's AGP test:
Pentium III @ 1585MHz - Radeon 9800 Pro:

Pentium III @ 1585MHz - GeForce 6800 GT: