A review sample from nVidia. It uses early A1-revision hardware and comes with a fancy nVidia aluminum box. This card is pretty much the roots of the final NV40 product. Just before nVidia sent these samples to reviewers a bug popped up regarding the fan-control. Due to this a small modification has been made on the back of the card.

To get a better view of what was going on with the NV40, I've made a time-line. It starts quite early and in the beginning it was unsure which name the NV40 would carry. I think that NV35 (a GeForce FX product) and NV40 were sometimes mixed up in those days.

21 March 2001
This is way back and after 3dfx had been acquired by nVidia. An article pops up that concepts/parts of 3dfx' next generation chip, called Mojo, might be used in the NV30 or NV40.

9 July 2002
Estimation of NV40's power: filtrate of 4 Gigapixel and 600 million polygons per second.

6 September 2002
NV40 is expected to be launched in second half of 2004. It will support DirectX 10 and will have 200 million transistors.

13 June 2003
NV40 will be launched in first quarter of 2004 and will be a high-end card with AGP8x and PCI-Expresss

14 August 2003
IBM will manufacture NV40 chips on 130nm. The chip has 300 million transistors en will be targeted for 600MHz.

13 September 2003
Both nVidia's NV40 and ATi's R420 won't appear in 2003.

14 January 2004
nVidia is ready with the NV40-chip and can deliver these to manufacturers in the end of February.

3 February 2004
GDDR3 memory chips aren't available in time for the NV40 and R420. The new cards might use GDDR2 instead.

6 Februari 2004
Despite that nVidia's first NV40-chip ran at 300MHz they focus on 600MHz. The second revision chips that will be ready in the end of February will reach 450MHz to 550MHz.

23 February 2004
ATi's R420 chip is ready for mass production.

15 ~ 19 March 2004
PCB date of my card.

21 March 2004
Specifications and benchmarks from the new NV40 leak out. The A2-revision (I have A1 on both PCB and GPU) runs at 475MHz with 256MB GDDR3 at 600MHz (DDR1200). As far as I can track down (and putting the cards into a timeframe) this A2-revision card has A2-revision PCB with A1-revision GPU.

1 ~ 2 April 2004
Chipdate of my card.

9 April 2004
The NV40, better known as GeForce 6800 Ultra, will have 16 pipelines just like the Radeon X800 XT. The X800 Pro will have 12 pipelines and the X800 SE get's 8. In the meantime The Inquirer finds out that ForceWare 60.72 reveals that GeForce 6800 Ultra will be the name of the new NV40 chip. It's also being noted that the NV40 will use 150W to 160W of energy.

13 April 2004
Specifications of the GeForce 6800 Ultra are leaked just before the NDA expires. The chip has 222 million transistors and is manufactured at 130nm by IBM. Clock frequencies are 400MHz for the GPU and 550MHz (DDR1100) for the GDDR3 memory. It's noted that nVidia tried to fix the problems of the GeForce FX by giving more attention to the pixel shaders.

14 April 2004
The NDA has expired and reviews pop up. Reviewers use the same card as I have and conclude that the card is a lot faster than the GeForce FX. It turns out that the cooling is quite good and the card uses 120W of energy.

16 April 2004
The X800 Pro will be launched on 4 may 2004.

19 April 2004
nVidia announces the Quadro FX 4000 which is based on the NV40 core.

20 April 2004
Overclocking, noise and energy consumption of the GeForce 6800 Ultra is being tested. It turns out that the card uses only 17W more than the Radeon 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. > Read more

The PCI-Express version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra. The NV45 chip is identical to the NV40 (AGP version). To get it working with the PCI-e bus, nVidia installed a bridge chip right next to the NV40 chip. > Read more

The successor of the GeForce 6800 Ultra. nVidia codenamed this card G70 rather than NV50 (6800 Ultra is codenamed NV40). The 7800 GTX made quite some improvements in both performance and image quality.

I've created a short time-line about the G70:
22 February 2005
Some references to NVIDIA G70 show up in ForceWare 75.90 beta driver. G70 is the code-name for the GeForce 7800 (GT/GTX).

13 March 2005
Announcement of G70 probably next month.

9 May 2005
Rumor: G70 won't run hot. It's cooling system will be single-slot.

10 May 2005
ATi's R520 won't be available before Q3 of 2005. R520 is the codename of the chip for the Radeon X1800.

13 May 2005
Rumor: G70 will be launched during Computex (which was on 31 May to 4 June). G70 will be manufactured on 110nm by TSMC and twice as fast as the GeForce 6800.

18 May 2005
Possible specifications of the GeForce 7800 GTX are: 110nm by TSMC. 24 pipelines and 430MHz which create 10 gigapixels per second. This is 60% more than the GeForce 6800 Ultra. 43% more vertices can be processed: 860 million per second which might be caused by increasing the vertex shaders from 6 to 8. 256MB GDDR3 running at 700MHz (DDR1400) will be used.

26 May 2005
Specifications of the G70 are released. Those from 18 May 2005 are correct.

30 May 2005
TSMSC is already mass-producing the G70 chip.

5 June 2005
ATi R520 may be announced on 26 july. G70 probably on 22 June.

14 June 2005
3DMark05 score of G70: 7703 3DMarks.

16 June 2005
More 3DMark05 scores: an Athlon 64 FX-57 @ ~ 3GHz scores 7823 points. In SLI it does 13142.

22 June 2005
Official announcement of the GeForce 7800 GTX. > Read more

With the GeForce 6-series nVidia was back on track. The 6600 GT was a mid-range card with a 128-bit memory bus. Due to high clock frequencies the card performed quite well, and with some older games, very good. The 6600-series always had higher clocks compared to their 6800 counterparts. nVidia build the 6600 GT chip with a smaller die-size which allowed higher clock frequencies.

This card from Club3D doesn't use high quality components. Over the years some of the capacitors start to break down. I also noticed that the Z-buffer in Wolfenstein Enemy Territory at 1600x1200 look 16-bit rather than 32-bit. This is probably a driver issue. > Read more

The graphics card I use in my main workstation these days. It's a decent card that runs great with Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

Both technical and performance-wise it's all fine as well. These G92-based cards don't seem to summer from problems with the ball-soldering like the G80's or 8400M mobile GPU's. Unfortunately from this time on nVidia started playing around with model numbers. nVidia ended up with the 8800GT, 9800GT and GTS 250 which are identical except for the manufacturing process (die-shrink from 65nm to 55nm). > Read more

> Read more