BeHardware - News - December 17, 2004

Gigabyte will announce today an original product, the Gigabyte 3D1. Gigabyte has actually indirectly used the NVIDIA SLI technology to integrate to a single graphic card two GeForce 6600 GT, each one equipped with 128 Mo of 128 bits memory. In practice there is a chance that this PCI Express graphic card will have the same behaviour as two GeForce 6600 GT in SLI.

In fact Gigabyte announces 3DMark03 score of 14293, instead of 13271 for a X850 XT PE and 12680 for a 6800 Ultra. According to our tests two GeForce 6600 GT in SLI provide the same result. Same causes same consequences: very good raw power (and high 3DMark scores helps to sale units), but reduced performance with high resolutions compared to 256 MB graphic cards like the GeForce 6800 GT, and an SLI which isn’t necessarily optimum for all games (see our NVIDIA SLI test)

This new product advantage (available in January) is of course its price. We think that it will be cheaper than two GeForce 6600 GT, and that it won’t require a motherboard equipped with two PCI express slots. ATI has however announced a few days ago the new Radeon X800 XL price: $299. So we think that the GeForce 6800 GT price ($400) will probably be reduced, and that it will be difficult for Gigabyte 3D1 to find customer except maybe Voodoo 5 nostalgic…

Update: According to Gigabyte, two 6600 GT in SLI would obtain 13540 at 3DMark03 with a test configuration based on an A64 3000+. So the 3D1 would be 5.6% faster. Now we will have to check if this gap is due to the fact that both chips are located on the same card or if frequencies weren’t simply set at 500/500.