By Thomas McDonald
If there’s one thing I love about console gaming, it’s that you know what hardware you’re getting when you buy the thing, and you know it will be good for about four years.

As we were going to press, the street prices for GeForce 6800 and 6800 GT boards were plummeting. XFX just announced a $50 mail-in rebate for this board, taking its street price into the under-$300 range.

Being a performance-oriented bunch of folks, we generally favor performance over price, but given the huge delta in street prices between this board and Sapphire’s slightly faster Radeon X850 XT, and looking at the narrow differences in performance, we have to give the nod to XFX’s GeForce 6800GT.
Besides, we know the XFX board will run in SLI mode today (in fact, it spanked Asus’ highly overclocked Extreme N7800 GTX Top).

We reviewed ATI’s own implementation of the Radeon X800 XL back in July, and we like Connect3D’s board just as much.

By Tom R. Halfhill
Engineers have their own version of the expression “passing the buck.” In the cube-farm offices of Silicon Valley, it’s called “throwing the problem over the wall.” That’s what hardware engineers are doing with multi-core processors.