6800le?

[Spriggan17]

Hey just wondering if its possible to unlock the 16pipes on this video card.
6800le
It says 8pixelpipelines but reviews say they can get it to 16?

 

[Powermoloch]

yes you can, since it's an AGP. The hidden pixel pipelines and vertex shaders can be unlocked by using rivatuner. Although I haven't attempted or have no idea on doing it. But i'm sure there are good amount of users in this community had done such an attempt. It's risky, some users (if you read all the reviews) had tried to unlocked the 6800LE end up having artifacts, or lucky enough to even have all 16 pipelines. All cards are different, but nonetheless, best bang for the buck :thumbsup:

Even that card cost 10 bucks cheaper than the 6600 256 mb agp just a few months back !!!

 

[Tsosczb]

It just so happens that I got one of these cards a week ago. So I'll tell you my experience.

I ordered the same Leadtek 6800 LE from Newegg.com for $130. It has a great fan and heatsink, which I think really are needed to make this card a great deal if you want to unlock+overclock. Well I decided to try out unlocking the stuff with RivaTuner, which was pretty easy with a good tutorial. I'm not sure how my scores compare to a regular 6800 with a similar PC (P4 2.53GHz, 1GB PC2700 DDRRAM), but here's some benchmarks from 3DMark'03: (before and after)

Game 1: 155fps / 175.8 fps
Fill rate (single): 2199.5 / 2442.2
Fill rate (multi): 2365.6 / 4658.8
Vertex Shader: 18.7fps / 25.3fps
Pixel Shader 2.0: 85.1fps / 127.4fps

Please note that the Pixel Shader 2.0 test was only done after unlocking the 2 vertex processors (the 85.1 mark). And Actually I may have unlocked one vertex processor for all the first results here.

Anyway, on the scores on the left is the card with (most) everything locked, i.e. the 2 vertex processors and 8 pipelines. The right side is with everything unlocked. Another note: the unlocked vertex processors alone brought the vertex processors test up to 24.9fps, and the fill-rate tests only changed after unlocking the pipelines. But nevertheless, it's quite an improvement. It looks like a 20-40% increase overall, depending on what parts of the card are utilized. I didn't see any visual defects during the tests, and have seen no problems with the two (albeit, somewhat older) games I have played since then. So it all looks good.

I haven't overclocked anything yet, but I'm not sure if I even can. I've read that with some cards you can't do both at the same time, only either unlock or overclock. Though it is possible. There are also different ways to unlock the masked parts, so maybe that would play a role in it. You can flash the BIOS into thinking it's a 6800GT (that has the stuff unlocked), but I'm not sure exactly what it may affect. There's also this line that could be used with RivaTuner, and it may actually work better than using the RivaTuner GUI to unlock the parts:

• RivaTuner.exe /wrc020,0 /wrc024,0 /wrc028,0 /wrc02c,0 /wr1540,13f0f /rr1540

You just make a text file, put this in it, rename the file with the .bat extension, then double-click it. (I guess it might have to be in the same folder as RivaTuner).

So if you really want to unlock+overclock, there are a few ways to try it to get it to work (if you even have problems doing it in the first place).


For me, it was a great deal, because it was cheap and I may have gotten better performance than a standard 6800 (which is 12x5). Plus, even if you can't unlock all the masked parts, there are still a good number of people that could get 12x6 or 12x5, which is great and maybe even better than a 6600GT. And if all unlocking fails utterly, you still have the option of overclocking the thing possibly a great deal, because it's already underclocked, and it has a great cooling device.

 

[mindgam3]

This card seems like a pretty sweet buy then!

 

[BrokenArrow]

I bought the chaintech version from ZZF, which unfortunately has a crappy heatsink on it. I replaced it with a Zalman cooler and mine unlocked to 16/5 and I currently have it overclocked to 370/770. I get >10K in 3d03 and >4K in 3d05. Good budget card if u can unlock its potential. If you unlock and get artifacts, you can just relock the damaged pipes/shaders. When I unlocked the 6th vertex shader, I got artifacts in 3d games. No real 'risk' unless you mean that you may not be able to fully unlock this card. I have never heard of permanent damage from unlocking the card.