Hi,Is anybody using this video card and if so what are your results or conclusions. I'm planning on building a new system 3.2 with this video card.How does it perform for you? According to Toms Hardware Guide it does real well but I wanted somebody running it with the addons.thanks,Sean

Hi!I got a 6800 ULTRA. If you are after 6800 non ULTRA they are quite different but 6800 GT/6800 ULTRA is pretty much the same except clock speeds.As for how I like it the antialiasing is not as good as on my old 9800 PRO. Also shader effects like on water is not as detailed. Otherwise it performs well but don

I love my 6800gt I am overclocked higher than a stock ultra and everything is smooth as a bell. Definately don't waste the money on the Ultra, just about all the GT's are easily able to do ultra speeds and if you get lucky you can go even higher, the GT's also have all the same pipes as the ultra but the 6800nu is shorted 4 pipes and 128mb of memory, not to mention that GT and Ultra are bothe DDR3 memory vice standard DDR. There is also a way to flash the Ultra Bios on to the GT card and be running at the higher voltage but this is going to make you run very hot on stock cooling. The max temps under load with FS9 that I am getting are 72c which is pretty good for these cards.Par,Have you looked into the NV5 cooler? they are only about 30 bucks and they are supposed to be great for cooling. You might also want to take the HSF off and put some AS5 on it and then all will be cool.

I don

The BFG 6800 GT OC is an excellent card, with excellent overclocking capabilities. I recommend it, and this with many years of Radeon experience--up through 9700 Pro which was decent, but terribly finicky by comparison. Everything runs great on this card, and there are absolutely zero hangs, artifacts, or anything. A perfect pick. Quiet enough as well.Noel

I am but one night away from upgrading my 9800 pro to a 6800 GT. My 9800 has been a noble steed, but I feel it is somewhat outclassed by the A64 powerplant I now have under the hood. I've done a few repeatable FS benchmarks so I can do a before and after analysis, with one of the scenarios registering around 9FPS (PMDG 737NG, VC, gray and rainy, EGLL at a gate facing many other EGLL gates, UT traffic @ 100%, FSGlobal 2005 mesh, 4xAA 2xAF, all sliders full right and all eye candy options selected (don't forget aircraft and ground object shadows people ;)) and a multi-monitor spread of panels). I don't seriously expect to tout the "never goes below 30FPS, EVER" upgrade claim that some here pronounce, but a few more FPS and butter smoothness is all I ask. Hopefully, the 6800 GT will deliver. :)Gary

I'm very happy with mine. Put it in with new processor, mobo and ram, about a month ago. I've had no problems whatsoever, and FS9 looks great. As for FPS and benchmarks, I don't worry about frames and I don't care about the benchmarks. As long as it runs smoothly with real world weather and the tons of AI I have flying around. I get that with the frames set to unlimited. All in all, it's a great card. If I had it to do over again, I'd do it over again.Cheers.

Well, I generally only turn on the FPS counter if play is getting a little too chunky or jerky, which 9 FPS will obviously give me. Besides, there have been a few here on this forum that are looking for quantitative data on the benefits of upgrading different components. Whilst others may not have the same add-ons as me, I hope to at least give an indication of the magnitude of performance boost people can expect under fairly high add-on loads.I'm glad that you've had a good experience with your 6800. What did you upgrade from?Gary

>Well, I generally only turn on the FPS counter if play is>getting a little too chunky or jerky, which 9 FPS will>obviously give me. Besides, there have been a few here on>this forum that are looking for quantitative data on the>benefits of upgrading different components. Whilst others may>not have the same add-ons as me, I hope to at least give an>indication of the magnitude of performance boost people can>expect under fairly high add-on loads.>>I'm glad that you've had a good experience with your 6800. >What did you upgrade from?>>Gary I certainly understand the compulsion to measure performance, and I have used the frame counter to try to determine what causes the biggest hits to performance. I just get the impression that quite a few people are obsessive about frame rates, even if there is no visual difference. For me, the most important thing is a smooth, fluid sim. My upgrade was from an 800Mhz Athlon and a 3Dforce2, so the difference for me is huge, as you can probably imagine. However, I think my biggest boost came from the 6800. After changing out the mobo and processor, I fired up FS9 with the old card still installed. The difference was noticeable, but not what I would call phenomenal. Even with my sliders still set to low levels, performance was improved, but not great. Once I dropped in the 6800, the difference was amazing to me. Even after maxing most of my sliders, the thing is just smooth as silk. As bang:buck goes, I got more from a $400 graphics card than I did from $500 worth of processor, mobo and memory. Since I can't put numbers to it, my post probably didn't halp you much. From the looks of your system specs, if your looking for a few more frames and a smoother ride, the 6800 should deliver. I'd like to see the results of your benchmark tests, if you don't mind posting them. You have me curious, now. :D

My initial results are not inspiring to say the least. In fact, one of the first scenarios I loaded up after swapping cards, cleaning out the old drivers, then loading up the latest nVidia Omegas was the 9 FPS killer I spoke of before. To my horror, the FPS sat just a tad higher at the 10 FPS level, no matter whether I had AA/AF completely off or at maximum visual glory. The default flight was not much better @ 26 FPS (the only difference over fresh default being UT @ 100% and FS Global 2005 mesh), since I had 26 FPS before. :-grr OK, I says to myself, I'll try and set my system up without any tweaking and see if I can get that 40fps on the ground at KSEA that others report with similar hardware. So I did a fresh install of Win XP, loaded all drivers off their installation disks until there were no more exclamation marks (including the VIA 4 in 1 drivers), installed SP2, resisted installing any memory/CPU hogging utilities and installed vanilla FS 2004 on the HDD. To my greater horror, the default flight loaded up and delivered me a throbbing 10 FPS - only 2/5's of what I was getting before! :-fume That was last night, and after that I gave up in disgust and went to bed. I'll try again this afternoon when I get home for work by loading the latest drivers I have in my collection. Any suggestions to end my upgrade depression would be appreciated :-hmmm GaryPS: I got the MSI 6800GT 256M jobbie.

LTCYCFG2 set the default 256 to 32 and you will be floored at the difference. It is in one of the posts for stutters in the performance forum. It completly turned my sim around. Also make sure that you have AA turned of and transform and lighting on, in settings in FS9 I know that is not vanilla setup but it is a requiremnet for faster sim.

Holy cow, I can't believe the new card didn't make any difference for you. I guess it's a testament to FS's ability to bring any computer to it's knees. Especially with the tons of add-ons you have. I wish I had some answers for you. My Windows is Win98 that was upgraded to XPPro SP1, then repaired when I upgraded hardware. I never did a clean re-install. Never went to SP2. I'm just using the vid drivers that came with the card. It shouldn't matter that you've got an MSI. It's my understanding that all 6800GTs have the same chipsets and use the same drivers. I hope you can get things straightened out. Methinks you might need to look in to making your sim more frame rate friendly. Maybe replace the cloud textures with smaller ones, replace some of your UT aircraft with Aardvark/FSPainter LOD models. That's an awful lot of stuff you're trying to run, there. Just a thought.Good luck.

>LTCYCFG2 set the default 256 to 32 and you will be floored at>the difference. It is in one of the posts for stutters in the>performance forum. It completly turned my sim around. Also>make sure that you have AA turned of and transform and>lighting on, in settings in FS9 I know that is not vanilla>setup but it is a requiremnet for faster sim. I've done this, too. I wasn't floored, but I did get a little more smoothness. Another tweak that is magic for some, ho-hum for others. Falls under ho-hum for me.Cheers.

Hey Gary, I just stumbled on to this. I don't know where you got your card, but it might be your problem.http://www.community.tomshardware.com/foru...=collapsed&sb=5

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I found the cause of my super-low 10 FPS where I was previously getting 26 FPS. My stock reinstall had me declock my CPU back to stock 3000+ speed (1.8GHz down from 2.4GHz) and I also installed AMD Cool and Quiet which I didn't have configured correctly that was subsequently running my CPU at 1GHz. As you can see, this nearly directly correlates with my FPS reduction. Even still, back at stock A64 3000+ speed of 1.8GHz with a 6800 GT 256M, I expected to see a little more than the 18 FPS I eventually acheived. Don't forget, that this is performance I am getting without ANY add-ons loaded. Hmmm.I also tried changing the video card latency down from 248 to 32, but this made no impact on my KSEA FPS, although from previous experience it does improve smoothness.I'm still checking into the MSI issue where they appeared to release some cards intended to be GTs with a non-GT core, but my research so far indicates this is limited to a batch sent to Germany and a few to Singapore, but more importantly for me it seems to only affect PCI-X cards - I have an AGP card. In any case, I will download Riva Tuner and see what it reports.Gary