Graphics New videocard: GF6800LE or R9800pro?

I'm getting $$$ for my birthday (turning 17 next march) so I "need" a new videocard. I've been looking around, and you can get a 6800Le for €230, and overclock the balls off of it to make it just as good and even better than a Radeon 9800. But a mate has a 9800pro and it looks good to me. The 9800 is a little cheaper, about €200, so more money left for modding...

So my question is, is the 6800LE (and then OCing) a better bang for the euro? My guess is it is, but I'm not exactly an expert... Any suggestions? (my budget is about €250)

edit: hang on a minute, the shop says that the chipset on the €230 6800LE is really a 6800 chipset, not the Limited Edition..... Do I spot a bargain, or just a typo?

 

GeForce 6800 without question.

 

Schweet, thanks.

 

A 6800 LE is a weirdified (in some way) version of the 6800 Vanilla; this will EASILY outclass a Radeon 9800 pro if I understand things correctly

EDIT: Further research shows that the 6800 LEs have 8 pixel pipelines over the 6800 vanilla's 12 and the 6800 GT, Ultra, and Ultra Extreme's 16

 

As far as I'm aware LE stands for Limited Edition. I found a review however that you can OC it up to vanilla 6800 specs, so I guess that's what I'll be doing. Thanks for the input, just making sure I don't get the wrong thing

edit: do these pipelines make much difference, and could I use a softmod driver to unlock them?

 

Those pipelines effect how much bandwidth there is available to the card and how much data can be transferred per clock; it can make a tremendous difference, but as I understand it, you can often unlock the extra 12 disabled pipelines. However, you might want to ask bigz about it before you buy it and try it

 

So in principle I could have a 6800LE with 16 pipelines Right gotta send bigz a PM now.... And I won't be buying it yet, I've got at least another month to wait before I have the money

 

Unlikely you will be able to ulock any pipelines nevermind all 8 disabled, but even if you don't its a good card in it's own right

 

Just out of curiosity, why wouldn't I be able to unlock those pipelines? If a softmod driver doesn't do the trick, can't I flash the BIOS to a version of the card with all 16 pipelines enabled?

 

I've been meaning to reply to this for the last couple of days, but I've been a tad busy recently with various bits and bobs taking over my attention... anyway, check out this thread and this one too - they should explain the theory behind unlocking the masked pipelines.

The only way to do this right now is with Rivatuner, via NVStrap, which allows you to manually override the configuration register on the GPU - the one that determines how many quads and vertex units are active. You may find that some are hardware masked though, and you will not be able to unlock these masked pipelines. You can get some nice gains though, with around a 40-50% chance of being able to unlock to 16fp/6vs over all GeForce 6800's and 6800LE's - there's only about a 10% chance that you won't be able to unmask anything.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks, that helps a lot! Looks like I'll be getting a 6800LE then, I've read lots of reviews saying it was better than the r9800pro without any mods at all Think of the potential!

mind you I will overclock the hell out of it to get my games running even better than they allready did. I'm OCing the balls off my r9550 and it just isn't good enough

 

Isn't a full on 6800 Vanilla only $10-$20 more then a 6800LE? Why not just go for that one?

 

Don't have 10-20 bucks I'm still looking to find a job, so I'm pretty tight about money. If the 6800 is the same as the LE but with a few things disabled, I'll save myself a few euro's, that's the logic behind it.

 

Ordered a 6800le, but Order247 decided to get taken over by Watford Electronics, make me re-order over the phone, then just not send anything Think I might have to give them a call...

<A88>

 

Well, if and when you get it, could you drop me a PM about it? You know, how much you managed to unlock, OC results, etc? It'd be nice to hear from someone directly how much they've managed to pry out Unless it's too much bother of course.

 

yeah sure, it's gonna be used in my (first) mod so I won't be doing too much to it whilst it's in my current setup, but I'll give you as much info as possible

<A88>

 

Cheers