Given that all six manufacturers included in this roundup used the exact same cooling design, being the NVIDIA reference cooler, there was not a lot that could be compared here. The biggest alterations here had to do with the graphic plastered to the cooler. Even the PCB designs were identical with almost all of them using the same components. Furthermore, all were able to achieve a core clock of over 500MHz and a memory frequency of 1.2GHz. This leaves us with only the price and package for comparison.

The first question you have to ask yourself is do you need to purchase a pre-overclocked graphics card? I guess to do this you first need to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages to such a purchase. The advantages to a pre-overclocked graphics card are better performance, although limited improvements they are there nonetheless. Another would be the fact that the manufacturer guarantees the overclock and it does not affect the warranty. Finally the last advantage is inexperienced users get the extra performance without the "daunting" overclocking procedure.

Okay so the disadvantages are? Well first and foremost the price, manufacturers seem to charge at least another $20 US for the overclocked variant. The performance increase on average was about 5% while the price increase was in some cases a 20% rise. Although some users may consider overclocking to be daunting this really is not the case. Most graphics cards even come with user friendly overclocking software these days. Nevertheless, the coolbits registry hack is the quickest and easiest way to overclock any NVIDIA based graphics card.

Therefore I strongly do not believe there is any value in purchasing a pre-overclocked graphics card if the same manufacturer sells a standard card for $20 US less. More often than not the memory is the same, the PCB design is the same and the cooling solution is the same. Therefore consumers are paying potentially $20 US more for a procedure that should take no more than 5 minutes. Squeezing another 55MHz out of a GeForce 6800GS core is extremely easy and I do not believe there is a 6800GS card out there that cannot achieve this.

The GeForce 6800GS is designed to be the ultimate performance vs. price graphics card. Therefore if I were to be purchasing one I would be aiming to pick up the cheapest version possible. This would leave me with the eVGA e-GeForce 6800 GS, Gigabyte GV-NX68G256D-B, MSI NX6800GS-TD256E and Leadtek WinFast PX6800 GS TDH. The prices of these four graphics cards will vary depending on where you look, though they should all be around the $190 US mark. While I am a huge fan of the MSI and Gigabyte cards I really like what the Leadtek WinFast PX6800 GS TDH has to offer at the price point. Therefore I am going to give this Leadtek graphics card the Legion Hardware Value Award!