A New Contender Sneaks In : MSI’s GeForce 6800 PCI Express @ GamePC

[Steve]

MSI have quietly brought onto the market a PCIe GeForce 6800 graphics card. What's unusual about the card is that until now, the standard GeForce 6800 has been based on the AGP NV40 core; any PCIe variants have used an AGP to PCIe bridge chip. However, this is not the case with MSI's latest product, as GamePC discovered:

What we see [in the picture] appears to be nVidia's first native PCI Express NV40 graphics processor. While we knew nVidia would eventually transition the 6800 series to work on a PCI Express connection without the need to use an HSI chip, we were surprised to see that this chip is actually shipping to market. The physical dimensions of the core are identical to that of nVidia's NV40 AGP variant, but the chip itself does not have any need for any bridge chips to connect to a PCI Express bus. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure if this is a “true” native PCI Express chip or if nVidia embedded the HSI logic within the core itself. Looking at the dimensions of the core, it would appear though that this is indeed a native PCI Express component.

Take a look at the review over here.

[DR]

For sure an interesting one - I didn't know NVIDIA had re-spun the GPU

[Steve]

Very sly of them.