[cadaveca]

I pulled this picture from techPowerUp!

Very interseting is that the chips that people got are the NV45, and the core should be the same size as the version on the right-hand side, including the bridge chip on the package. MSI pleads in thier press release(only available in german) that they are not too sure how the chips ended up not working as 6800GT's. It seems as though they have been using AGP parts as PCI-E parts, and according to Nvidia's specifications, the bridged chip should work just the same as the native pci-e part(the smaller core on the left of the picture), but for some reason the motherboard bios identifies the chip as a regular NV40(plain 6800) rather than the proper NV45(bridged agp part with 6800gt functionality). Users that have the smaller chip on thier PCI-E cards and no bridge chip need not worry.

This causes a bit of unrest, as it seems that there are more than 3 revisions of the Nvidia 6800 processor out there, and all are possibly sold with any of the 6800/6800gt/6800u functionality. This means that if you buy any 6800, you are taking your chances as to just which chip you are going to get!

this is not a new thing in the market...for quite some time graphics chips manufacturers have been selling parts the do not perform up to spec as lower-rated parts, like the ATI 9800PRO which can feature either a R350 or a R360 chip "under the hood". It seems that nobody really knew before that Nvidia was doing this with the 6800's. Also seems that for some reason the bridge chip does not work properly. I'm pretty sure that the same bridge-chip is the reason the 6800 is not able to do "Pure Video" either....or maybe it's because it's an agp 8x part overclocked to pci-e 16x?