Well, I got my Gigabyte Geforce 6800NU yesterday.. This is the Passively cooled version.. Installed without issue. It's awesome and it's obviously silent! BUT, I couldn't leave good enough alone...

I decided to Flash the VGA bios to the latest posted on Gigabytes site as it supposedly speeds things up a bit.. I used Gigabytes windows bios flash utility and then it happened...FAILED... UGH!!!! I tried and tried to re-flash. Even back to the original bios I backed up! BUT to no avail..

So, I decided to reboot..and.....nothing....blank screen... I thought I was toast and just broke my brand new $300 card. Well, I didn't give up. I downloaded Gigabyte's dos utility, made a boot disk, and copied the updated bios onto it. I then did the bios update from the command line ....blind. I had no video out on my monitor! I waited about 2 minutes until I guessed it was done, rebooted and blammo! It worked! Needless to say, I was sweating it out, but now I'm REAL happy.

Moral of the story: If you want to flash your gigabyte vga bios, do not use their windows tool.

Thanks!
KF[/u]

funny / scary story

i've been in a similar situation before... somehow my old mobo would corrupt its BIOS about twice a year. it would refuse to boot or give any video signal. the first time it happened i had to DOS flash the BIOS blind.... i agree with you that it is a tad nerve-wrecking. after that i made a boot disk that had an autoexec file to reflash the BIOS. works great... whenever i got a corruption after that i could just pop in the disk and reboot. never did figure out why it was happening.

damn that would scare the shit out of me! hahahah new card and it breaks lol.

congrats on the blind bios hahahah

LOL. I remember Abit had windows flashing tool for their motherboards. Never worked properly thought. Guess bios flashing is still one of those things that are best left in the realms of DOS. Lucky escape

Yep, very lucky! Funny part was my wife had no idea why I was so mad at first and then why I was so happy!

I've been working on computers for ~15 years and I just proved your never too experienced to do something boneheaded!! The whole time I was using the windows flash utility I was thinking I really shouldn't be doing this! ...I was right.

I always have mixed feelings about flashing from Windows too... even though I have done it on occasion in machines without floppy drive (too lazy too create a cd or anything). Mainly done it on Asus motherboards. So far it has always worked, but I definitely agree with the feeling of "wrongness".

LOL

Re-reading: when I write "flashing from Windows" I obviously mean that I am trying to flash a bios chip while running the Windows operating system, not that other type of flashing

Tee-Jay,

That's histerical! I was just about to crack a joke about 'Flashing from Windows" !

KF

You might want an old PCI vidcard sitting around for this kind of situation.

Would be interesed to know what the GPU temps are - does the card have temp monitoring through coolbits?

Davidstone28,

Temps are ~50C idle ~82 under load

KF

nice temps for a passively cooled gpu

i saw that card and i htought no way it would not overheat.

I"m happy to see it works.

Can you get these cards in the UK atm?

dabs has them for £210.99 but they have none in stock


overclock for £226.83 but none in stock

Do you know dabs or overclock are likely to get some more in stock?

Probably at some point, but that is not much help right now

I'm currently looking for a review that compares the performance of this card to other 6800 cards. Especially now as Gigabyte has released new firmware to speed it up at little.

I had heard rumours that it was only equivalent to a 6800 Lite, not even a standard 6800. I am new to the 6800 line mind, so please don't jump on me if that souds daft

it is actually just a regular 6800NU, not an LE as some people have speculated. I just got one last week from newegg and it came w/ the old bios which only had 8 pipelines enabled. In order to get 12 pipelines enabled, I had to flash the bios.

There's a review here (although not very comprehensive):
http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?o ... 6&Itemid=0

Some fortunate users have reported getting all the way up to 6800 Ultra performance through softmodding although I have not personally been so lucky. When enabling the last for pixel pipelines in Rivatuner, I get mild artifacts which is kinda annoying so I left them off. I was however, able to get 6 vertex shaders instead of 5. Overclocking performance for me has been decent. I can run up to 400mhz core and 800mhz memory.

My temps are really high at 72idle and 86 load.

Overall, I'm quite happy w/ the performace of this card since I can run the only game I play (CS source) at 16x12 w/ full settings and still get 70+ fps.

Oh bugger, this stuff can get too complex for my little brain. I thought that there were only 3 chipsets 6800, 6800GT, 6800U.

I think I may be getting the impression that the 6800 is the same as 6800NU, but I'm not sure. If that is the case then I'm a happy bunny again as I understand that range on offer

yeah, there are three models; 6800, 6800GT and 6800Ultra. 6800NU is the same as a regular 6800.

A 6800LE was supposed to happen, but never was released... perhaps in the future?

Forgive me for any confusion! haha.

Don't worry, the confusion is all mine. If there was one thing in life I would like to patent, that would be it

I think you're all on the right lines.

As far as I understand, the chips in order of performance are:-

1. 6800 Ultra
2. 6800 GT
3. 6800 (the Gigabyte passive board).
4. 6800 LE

The Ultra and GT have 16 pipes.
The 6800 12 pipes and the LE a somewhat crippled 8.

What seems to be rather confusing is that manufacturers mix and match clock speeds and also memory types (Asus is a particular culprit) which really confuses the issue, and also the amount of memory varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, as well as calling their card names which don't at all relate to the chipset (Asus V9999 anyone?)

So you can get a 6800 card with 256 or 128 ram, which could be GDDR3 or plain vanilla DDR which doesn't perform as well. Or it could be 6800 stock mhz speeds or something different. As could the memory.

Then some manufacturers such as BFG who sell their card with higher clock speeds 'out of the box' having fully tested it at the overclocked speeds. The cards then end up pretty close performance wise to the next card in the range.

It's all as clear as mud with the marketing spiel!

The hard part is getting a hold of the cards. Most of the shops I deal with are sold out of the 6800 Ultras, and only have a ok selection of the 6800 GT's.

Well I should hopefully have my fanless gigabyte soon. Dabs.com finally changed its due date on my order to tomorrow.
Hope I can unlock it to 16 pipes.

dabs...*sigh* I sent them an email to see if they would supply Nidec HDDs. All I got was an 8 hour delay,, then an automated response to fill in the form that I had just completed.

Hope you have better luck I have a feeling that all 16 pipes may be yours...

Update:

Tried enabling all the pipes again once I updated to the newest forceware drivers. For some reason, the mild artifacts that appeared previously have all gone away.

Not quite sure what it was that resolved the issue, but nonetheless, happy to report that my card is nearly running at 6800 GT speeds.

I got my Gigabyte Geforce 6800NU a few days ago. Ive unlocked it to 16pipes.

Conditions for both tests:

PSU with Nexus 120mm @ 990prm
Case Fan on back Nexus 120mm @ 1080rpm
XP-120 with Papst 120mm @ 5v

Idle was in windows
Load was 30min of Counterstrike Source


Asus GF4 Ti4600 X4 AGP

                                   Idle                     Load
                                   79 Watts             115 Watts
CPU                            31 ºC                   38 ºC
HD (DTemp)              38 ºC                   37 ºC
HD (Probe on side)   41 ºC                   40 ºC
PSU                            35.5 ºC                38.2 ºC
PSU Exhaust              30.8 ºC                32.1 ºC
Graphics*                   39.7 ºC                 46 ºC

*Temperature probe attached to zalman ZM80A-HP on back of card



Gigabyte Geforce 6800NU X8 AGP

                                    Idle                     Load
                                    87 Watts             124 Watts
CPU                             32 ºC                   37 ºC
HD (DTemp)               37 ºC                   37 ºC
HD (Probe on side)    37 ºC                   38.2 ºC
PSU                             34 ºC                   38.4 ºC
PSU Exhaust               32 ºC                   34.6 ºC
Graphics*                   55 ºC                   62.5 ºC

*Temperature probe attached to Stock Fanless Heatsink on back of card


Some of the temp readings might be inaccurate with the Akasa FC-03 fan controller/temp probes.
Btw the core temperature doesnt show up for me in nvidia control panel or rivatuner. Im running Detonators 66.93

(UK) Dabs have 11 cards in stock again - 15 Nov 04 - have just placed an order for one. Hopefully this should go through.

The card i got from Dabs doesnt report core temperature at all with either F1 or F2 bios.

My card had the 12 pipes working with the F1 bios. I upgraded to the F2 bios to see if I can see the core temperature, no core temp but my DVI didnt work anymore and I get a few random reboots!

My advice is if rivatuner reports the card as 12x and 5vp then dont flash to F2.

Don't you need to do the coolbits hack to enabled temp monitoring in NV controller?

What really amazes me with this thread is that we here have reports of a Vanilla 6800 passively cooled running at almost half of it's thermal limits. I don't know if this has been concluded elsewhere, but to me it is news that a fanless Zalman VGA-cooler goes hand in hand with a 6800 vanilla (and obviously with a 6800U as well).







Second, through work, I have seen (and sold) 6800LE:s, So I think they happened

Edit: Me no friend meta-taggs