Product Reviews

If the arrival of Doom 3, the latest and most demanding 3D game (reviewed on page 94) has already set your PC quaking in the corner, it could be that your graphics card needs upgrading. We've already seen systems that use graphics cards based on nVidia's GeForce 6800 graphics chipset - namely, the 6800GT and its exceedingly pricey brother, the 6800 Ultra. Now it's time for the more reasonably priced 6800 to try its might against the Buyer benchmarks.

The first thing you'll notice about this card is its bulk. The Galaxy has a huge fan and heatsink attached to its back, which will render the PCI slot immediately next to the AGP slot unusable. The fan makes good use of the extra slot, though, by blowing the hot air from the card out of your case through the gap where the extra slot's blanking plate should be. Because the fan is large, it doesn't have to revolve as quickly, so it's not as noisy as the fans on other graphics cards.

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this fancy cooling would be much use without the performance to back it up, and the Galaxy 6800 wowed us with its abilities. In 3DMark 2001 the Galaxy racked up a whopping 17,359 marks. That's 5,500 marks ahead of our current Top 50 card, the Sapphire Radeon 9800SE. Current games are just no match for the Galaxy's 3D brawn. New games such as Far Cry and Doom 3, however, use many of the graphical effects available in Microsoft's DirectX 9 standard - something the older 3DMark 2001 can't do. For a really stressful test, we fired up Doom 3. Doom 3 is a stunning looking game, but also highly demanding as it uses the latest graphical techniques to create realistic light and shadow and monstrously vivid characters. We ran our standard Doom benchmark at 1,024x768 resolution and high detail. To stress the card even further we enabled 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering (settings that make graphics look better but slow the PC down a little) in the graphics card control panel. The Galaxy revelled in the challenge and sprinted to the finish with a smooth 44.3 frames per second. That's more than four times faster than our Top 50 card which stumbled to the finish with a paltry 9.6 frames per second!

The Galaxy Glacier may cost twice as much as the Sapphire Radeon 9800SE, but if you're serious about games, you'll find it has enough horsepower to slice through even the very latest titles. In fact, the Galaxy lags only slightly behind its big brothers the 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra. Even the most avid gamers won't need anything faster.