AFTER BOTH 3D giants pretended AGP market didn't existed for better part of 2005 (bear in mind that last announced AGP products were X850XT PE AGP and 6600GT), this week resulted in not one, not two, but three new AGP products. ATi's partners came out with announcements of X1300 and X1600, while Albatron was the first "green" company to announce GeForce 6800GS for beloved AGP slot.
However, don't be tricked by the name, as there are some not so subtle differences between the PCI Express and AGP version. The GeForce 6800GS for PCI Express is a respin of well-known NV41 chip with native PCI Express interface (NV41a) and 6800GS AGP is actually the original NV41, first 110nano chip for nVIDIA. The NV41 chip was also known as "6800 with working PureVideo acceleration", altough you loose one Quad (4 Pixel Processors) and a Vertex Shader. The board pretty much looks the same as any 6800 and 6800GT board with single-slot cooling, and is sharing the clock-speed with 6800GT. So, the 6800GS AGP works at 350 MHz for the 12 pipe GPU, and 1000 MHz for 256MB of GDDR-3 memory.
Altough the PCIe version of the board works at 425 MHz, the AGP version is clocked less by whole 75 MHz. If you ask yourselves why, we can't think about anything else but politics. Our guess is that nVIDIA tries to make PCI Express look better by higher clocking the PCIe products - remember 6600GT in AGP version? It had 100 MHz slower memory (same GPU clock though), and when clocked to same speeds as its PCIe board, it beated the schyte out of the PCIe product. Mostly because PCIe was Intel-only domain, and we all know how Intel gets demolished by AMD in games.
P.S. 6600GT AGP at 500/900 MHz beated 500/1000 in almost every game, so even that move didn't helped the PCI Express version.
However, don't be tricked by the name, as there are some not so subtle differences between the PCI Express and AGP version. The GeForce 6800GS for PCI Express is a respin of well-known NV41 chip with native PCI Express interface (NV41a) and 6800GS AGP is actually the original NV41, first 110nano chip for nVIDIA. The NV41 chip was also known as "6800 with working PureVideo acceleration", altough you loose one Quad (4 Pixel Processors) and a Vertex Shader. The board pretty much looks the same as any 6800 and 6800GT board with single-slot cooling, and is sharing the clock-speed with 6800GT. So, the 6800GS AGP works at 350 MHz for the 12 pipe GPU, and 1000 MHz for 256MB of GDDR-3 memory.
Altough the PCIe version of the board works at 425 MHz, the AGP version is clocked less by whole 75 MHz. If you ask yourselves why, we can't think about anything else but politics. Our guess is that nVIDIA tries to make PCI Express look better by higher clocking the PCIe products - remember 6600GT in AGP version? It had 100 MHz slower memory (same GPU clock though), and when clocked to same speeds as its PCIe board, it beated the schyte out of the PCIe product. Mostly because PCIe was Intel-only domain, and we all know how Intel gets demolished by AMD in games.
P.S. 6600GT AGP at 500/900 MHz beated 500/1000 in almost every game, so even that move didn't helped the PCI Express version.