👏👏👏 Fantastic start to the series! Yeah GF6 is near and dear to my heart for all the reasons you laid out here. Definitely among my top favorite GPU architectures of yesteryear.

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

Thank you very much, Mr. Pipes! 😂 Big praise coming from you. I'm glad you liked it, and I hope I can do equal justice to the next 25 cards in the lineup.

Love the intro and outro by the way. Was a nice surprise seeing this vid popup. The 6800 is one of my favourites. I pondered back in the day between this or an x850xt. It was a toss up between HL2 or Doom3. So I went for Doom3 and a 6800, a nice shiny Gainward golden sample GLH edition. Paired with my fave s939 3500+ it was extremely capable. Good times, and good vid!

Great video, Amber. First time I've seen the new intro and transitions and I love them. This is also the first time I've heard someone specify a favourite DX9 GPU architecture - maybe I'm wathing the wrong videos. I have a pair of 6800-somethings that I bought years ago but have never got around to testing so now I'm intrigued, particularly by SLI scaling.

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! It's been a while, I hope you're doing well!

Thank you for this substantial video, looking forward for more!

I still own my Geforce 6800GT that probably marks the end of my identity as a gamer. I bought it brand new only a couple of months after launch when Doom 3 made a mockery of my beloved Radeon 9800 Pro (another card I still have). It was no fault of the card that I stopped gaming so much - life did that to me. I felt so guilty not getting decent use out of it that I kept the card going for 3 years. It was Oblivion that pushed me onwards and a Radeon X1900XT crossfire setup became my final fixed pipeline setup. Incidentally, I followed this with the HD3870 in crossfire as well, because apparently learning from mistakes was not a thing for me back then.

Going back and experiencing this stuff now is just...kinda amazing. As far as Windows PCs go I never knew the loving, warm embrace of a dedicated graphics card back in the day. Up until I got my late '06 MacBook Pro, I subsisted entirely on software rendering and integrated graphics. I remember the day I got that MBP, installed some of my old games onto it via Boot Camp, and just...WOW. Game changer. Before that? Last dedicated GPU I ever had was an ATI Mach64 in my Power Mac 9500. Yeahhhh.

Awesome aesthetic and production value!

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

Thank you!!

Phenomenal video! Great information, flow, editing, and story telling!

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

Thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

Back in the day I had a Radeon 9600XT card and it was really good. When I upgraded to my Athlon64 I started off with a 9700 card which was nice, but when the 6000 series launched I splurged and I bought a 6800 card I don't think it was the highest end one, but it was still up there. I kept that card until I replaced it with an X1900XT or something in PCIe when I upgraded my motherboard, and there was no AGP on the board. I still have the 6800 card somewhere along with the X1900 card too. I should pull them out of storage and play with them some time. Excellent video.

The GeForce 6200 was amongst the first dedicated graphics cards that I owned. Honestly looking back it was awful but I played everything on that card with my Athlon XP 3200+ system. Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst, Phantasy Star Universe, Oblivion, Morrowind, Warcraft 3, Crysis, World of Warcraft, I just played everything on it. I didn't even realize at the time how bad it was until I upgraded to a Radoen HD 2600 XT AGP. As short lived as it was it showed me the light of what I was missing out on and led me to my first actually nice GPU purchase a Radeon HD 3870 to pair with a Core 2 Duo E7500. I kind of wish I still had that GeForce 6200, I would frame it and put it up on my wall. It was the XFX model.

Great video! I had a 7800GT AGP Card back in 2005/6 I felt like such a baller...then I went SLI 8800 GT Super + 1GB PCIE. But I remember my last AGP Card fondly! Wish I still had it :(

One of the first GPUs I used quite a bit when I first started PC gaming (7800 GS to be exact, AGP!). Ran stuff like Knights of the Old Republic, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Counter-Strike Source, Half-Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead 2, Gears of War, etc. all with ease. :3

Great Video Very Impressed With your GPU Knowledge Amber

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

Thank you!! Glad you enjoyed the video!

My first GPU was the notorious ATI Rage Fury Maxx, then I jumped all the way from GeForce4 MX to an Alienware M11x R2 laptop with a mobile Fermi GPU, GeForce GT 335M. Basically took a break from the hobby from 2004-2012.

At the end of 2004 i bought an asrock hybrid motherboard with socket 754&939 with ali chipset an athlon 64 3500+ and an asus v9999 geforce 6800gt, the results was stunning! I was able to finally play butery smooth doom 3 and half life 2

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

YES! Half-Life 2 on my 6600 GT was AMAZING!

I finished school in 2006, worked in summer and bought a GeForce 7900 GT in autumn from the money I earned. It was way faster than my previous FX 5900 XT. Some month later I switched to a brand new GTS 8800 640. Good times. 😊

I had a 6800 GS AGP and was able to use Rivatuner to unlock the disabled pipes to make it, effectively, a 6800 GT. It had a full NV40. Great card, and an amazing value.

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

This card will also unlock, but one of the masked pixel shaders is bad, so when unlocked it generates sparkles in shaded surfaces.

@futurepastnow

4 ай бұрын

@@TechAmbr Ah, that's too bad. Of course, I accidentally killed my card by dropping the tip of a screwdriver on it.

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

@@futurepastnow oh NO!

The GeForce 6 series holds a place in my heart only because it was the last generation to release Win9x drivers. I have two cards myself, a 6800 Ultra and a 6600 GT. The 6800 Ultra is so loud that I prefer to use the passively cooled, i.e. silent, 6600 GT. In contrast, I can overclock my X6800 CPU to 3.47 GHz. In my opinion, the performance is not sufficient for Windows XP. Thanks to the video, I can now make a better comparison.

I have one of these for my Pentium 4 setup, it's very capable and as you said, didn't cost an arm and a leg 😅Now I want to play oblivion again... :D Remember friends, feel the power of the like button by hitting it with nvidia detonator driver technology!

I went from an MX 440 to a 7600GS. Truly one of the last AGP gaming focused cards. For the price, both were excellent cards. Not sure how the 7600GS compared to the 6800GS, but I do know that it wasn't a whole lot slower than the 7600GT, unlike the 6600GT which was miles better than all other 6600s, and even some 6800s. But still, I would've loved to have the 6800 back in the day.

Boy was this a time warp for me. My first new Nvidia GPU was a 6800GT. I remember being disappointed in color details over my old ATI 9600XT at the time. (Diablo 2 Lord of destruction) If I remember correctly, Was around the time Steam came out with Orange Box and Half Life 2. I was running a P4 Nothwood 3.0 ghz and a 800 front side bus. Thanks Tech Ambrosia for the look back and review.

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

What a PC gaming golden age, huh? Orange Box, Diablo II, the 6800 GT... Good times. I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

@Obie327

4 ай бұрын

It sure was! Almost magical with the Discreet Sound Blaster THX sound card and a good 21 inch CRT 80 hertz monitor. Orange box with Portal and Team Fortress 2. Unreal Tournament 4, Rainbow Six 3, Etc...

Still running 3 Curie cards a 6600 GT, 6800 GT and a 6800 XT recieved them free of charge 2 years ago from an online seller complimentary when just buying DDR ram for a 98 machine i have😊

Very nice and detailed test 👍 I also have the same board. With exactly the same CPU, the X6800 and 2 GB DDR 400. Only I use an HD4670. Very frugal platform, it even works wonderfully for me with a simple 80+ 350 watt office power supply from be quiet. And about the prices, you're right. Often something unrealistically high, I don't buy that.

Had first a 6800GT AGP (on an Asus NCCH-DL with two Xeon 2,8Ghz Nocona CPUs), then swiched to a 6800GT PCIe (Athlon 64X2 4200+ on a Asus M8N-SLI deluxe). Before that I used a Radeon 9700Pro and after the 6800GT PCIe I bought a 7950GX2.

I had an ATI 9600 Pro and upgraded to an 6800 GT, it was awesome :D

Thanks

@TechAmbr

4 ай бұрын

👀

haha i hope thats a real custom boot screen for XP! i have a 6800gt that my friend handed over to me a few years back... kinda shocked me. a really nice EVGA one, too. I have an intel 865 motherboard that i need to resurrect (cap plague!) so I can use it on a suitably powerful machine. either that or hack up some drivers to get it running in my w98 machine (lol probably wont do that)

Curie even with the newer cards with more shaders simply can't touch Crysis. It takes the fastest cards- optimally in SLI- to even touch playable performance with visuals any better than Far Cry from 2004. Curie is just not an architecture fit for Crysis, and even R500 isn't all that much better. Still, and X1950XTX is a good step above.

I totally just put a 6600 in my server the other day for testing thinking it was a different card (quadro 2000)

@forbiddenera

4 ай бұрын

Lol and yes I was stuck on a fx5200 for a while back in the day 😂

Anything AGP is expensive now in my country. Luckily I still have my agp 6600gt from back in the day, and it still runs well after replacing the paste, but many people in the retro community have claimed it has issues with some earlier games due to lack of table fog and palletized texture support; something that plagued ATI cards on windows 98 and earlier, but hits Nvidia cards in early XP. I don't recall any issues when I used it back in the day, but they are pretty insistent.