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.

Feature-wise, the new core has increases in both the vertex shader and pixel pipeline departments. The four vertex shaders of the old FX5950 have been joined by another two, while the number of pixel pipelines has doubled from eight to sixteen. As well as these changes, the core also supports 3.0 shaders which will form part of the next version of DirectX 9, version c. This gives the card a degree of future-proofing, although only time will tell if software developers and game coders fully utilise the new specifications.

As with the previous FX5950 Ultra, the cooling heatsink for the chip is huge, and you have to sacrifice two PCI slots to accommodate the card. For its version of the 6800 Ultra, MSI may have added its own style of heatsink and cooler but the size issue remains.

To get around the fact that today's cards are at the limit of how much current can be pulled from a single power connection, the 6800 Ultra has two 4-pin Molex connectors on the PCB, which could cause a problem as inside most cases spare power connectors are at a premium. If you go for this card, you may well have to upgrade your power supply anyway, as nVidia recommends that a 480 Watt supply should be used with the card.

MSI supplies an impressive bundle of games and utilities with the card. Utilities include a bundle of MSI's own useful tools; Media Deluxe Centre, which allows you to browse all your multimedia files under a single application; 5.1 DVD player; Super Pack, which includes Photoshop Album SE and 3D Album SE; and 3D Desktop. There's also a CD containing Virtual Drive 7 Professional and Restore It 3, while the driver CD has yet more useful goodies; Live Update, which allows live updates of the BIOS and drivers for the graphics card; WMIinfor, a DMI for system information, amongst others.

The games supplied are full copies of URU, XIII and Prince of Persia 3D, if that wasn't enough you also get a 14-in-1 games collection.

Verdict
It's expensive, but if you have deep pockets and want a blisteringly quick graphics card then MSI's NX6800 Ultra does have the advantage of a huge amount of bundled software and next generation performance.

Company: MSI

Contact: 020 8813 6688

Tags: nvidia directx video card vertex shader advanced micro devices graphics processing unit geforce hardware