I would like to start this article by saying that this MSI FX6800 Ultra card was not provided to us for review by MSI. Instead, this card was bought by my good friend Naser and I borrowed it from him for a few hours for benchmarking. Naser was informed that this was the only card available in the UAE which surely attaches a premium to the price- he paid approximately 2700/- Dirhams which translates to over US$730/- OUCH.

Anyways- enough of that. Much has already been said about nVidia’s NV45 GPU so we’re not going to go into the architecture and features of nVidia’s latest and greatest. Lets start straight away with the packaging of the MSI NX6800 Ultra.

MSI does a pretty good job with the packaging- somewhat similar to their 5900 Ultra card. You can see that the box is nicely sized and flips open to show some of features of the latest nVidia GPU along with a cut-out that lets you see the actual card. The back of the package lists some of the included application and games and they sure are plenty.

MSI bundles a total of eleven CDs and includes new games like Prince of Persia, XII and URU. On the applications side, you get Intervideo WinDVD Player and Creator, VirtualDrive and MSI Media Center. Two power cables and one S-Video cable is also included in the package along with one DVI-VGA converter.

The card itself is a monster- pretty much your standard FX6800 Ultra reference design with two power connectors on the back and two DVI connectors along with an S-Video connector on the front. You’ll definitely lose the PCI slot next to your AGP slot due to the mammoth cooling solution. The card is very noisy until Windows is loaded and the fan enters a lower speed mode which is still not very quiet. Lets take a look at the testbed.

For comparison, we've chosen the Sapphire x800 PRO, the Gigabyte 9800XT and the Enyaah FX5900 Ultra. The drivers used to test these cards are mentioned above. For benchmarking we've selected the following applications:

Far Cry:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Unreal Tournament 2004:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Halo:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
3D Mark 2001SE:	Default Settings
Aquamark3:	Default Settings
3D Mark 2003:	Fill Rates (Single/Multi Texture), Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader 2.0
SpecViewPERF 7.11:	Default Settings.

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com