When Nvidia brought out the G70 core (7800 GTX/GT) it came as no surprise to see the once-mighty 6800 series start to dwindle away. But this left ATI with a market segment to itself, which it more than adequately filled with the Radeon X1600XT. Needless to say, this left Nvidia a bit miffed, so it brought out the PCI-E 6800GS.

Unlike its 6800 siblings, the GS is not built around the NV41 but the die-shrunk, 110nm NV42, which allows for faster clock speeds while at the same time needing less cooling. Gainward, meanwhile, is well know for producing overclocked graphics cards, its Golden Sample boards being firm favourites in gaming circles, but now the company has gone a step further with a new range of boards under the BLISS label.

With the new line, Gainward has covered all the bases for any new card, and as it stands the range runs to three separate versions for the most popular cards; the standard vanilla reference design, the overclocked core and memory options of the Golden Sample line and now the BLISS GLH range with redesigned PCBs, better quality parts, overclocked cores and faster, non-standard memory chips.

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The BLISS 6800GS Goes Like Hell (GLH) is one of a pair of cards that launch the new range (the other being the BLISS 7800GT GLH). Both feature bright red PCBs and, right from the word go, you can see the care and attention that has gone into them. The 6800GS GLH has the same single-slot cooler as the reference design but is fitted in a horizontal mirror of the standard layout.

A quick glance over the rest of the board shows that the capacitors have been arranged differently and there are more of them; not only have they been moved, they are of a much higher quality. This is an aid to stable performance, both at standard speeds and when overclocked, offering better card reliability to boot.

The standard vanilla 6800GS has a 425MHz core and 256MB of memory clocked at 500MHz (1GHz effective). The need for higher quality components on the BLISS 6800GS becomes apparent when you see the clock speeds.

The core itself has been given a healthy 60MHz boost to 485MHz, but better still is what Gainward has done with the memory. Not only is there twice the standard amount (i.e. 512MB) but faster memory chips have been used; 1.4ns compared to the standard board's 2.0ns. This enables the memory to be clocked at 650MHz (1.3GHz effective) and also allows you to overclock further should the need arise.

All this gives the BLISS 6800GS stunning performance for its price range, for the most part faster than the legendary and considerably more expensive 6800 Ultra. When tested at a 1024 x 768 resolution, 3DMark05 scores a very healthy 5965, along with 56fps in Half Life 2 and 74fps in Far Cry, both games running with all detail settings at maximum.

Overall its combination of performance versus price makes the purchase of this card almost a no-brainer, but be prepared to search for it - it may not be around for too long.