Thread: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 Graphic Card

The 9800GX 2 is a card that some of us feel should never have been born. Of course some of us feel the same way about the 9800GTX, which was wrongly touted as the new high-end part from NVIDIA, but that's history now. Instead NVIDIA should have launched the GTX 280, which is nearly as fast as the 9800 GX2 at times, and faster than it most of the time. Like the 7900 GX2, the 9800 GX2 is a double PCB card sheathed in a metal casing that also acts as a passive heatsink. Unfortunately the 9800 GX 2 is a very hot card, and the fact that both PCBs are less than an inch apart, ditto the 128 SPs that each of the two 9800 GTX cores sport. Sporting a whopping 256 SPs the 9800 GX2 is a powerful solution. It also gets 1 GB of RAM, 512 MB for each GPU. In terms of pricing the 9800 GX2 has experienced a 25 per cent drop in its original pricing. Despite this, it continues to be a slow seller for NVIDIA the reason, it's a dual GPU solution that not everybody may want to use. The plus you can enable SLI on this card without needing an SLI ready motherboard.

Features
We tested just three cards based on this chipset two from ASUS, and a single card from XFX. While the other two were clocked at the NVIDIA-recommended 600 MHz the ASUS EN9800GX2 TOP was clocked at 670 MHz. This card ships in a huge box that includes a neat leather CD case and mousepad something that ASUS ships with all its cards. Also bundled was a full version of Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, which is a superb game. The plain jane ASUS EN9800GX2 also ships with the same game. We feel the choice of bundled game is as important as just giving a new game that nobody would want to play. All these cards sport the reference NVIDIA cooling assemblies (which we feel is woefully inadequate). Also integrated is an HDMI port, apart from the two regular DVI ports.



Performance
The 9800 GX2 is a very solid performer. Although it doesn't run away with all the accolades we'd like to point out the consistency of the results, which is something NVIDIA is to be commended for. This trio is the only one to consistently offer more than 30 fps on Crysis S.T.A.L.K.E.R. still favours the more powerfulGTX 280 at lower resolutions in particular. Company Of Heroes shows it is severe with multi GPU solutions and the 9800 GX2s get murdered by every other high-end card in this comparison NVIDIA fix your SLI drivers.

All these cards are able to chew up EEAR and World In Conflict gives a consistent 35 fps which doesn't say much other than our CPU being a bottleneck. The overclocked ASUS EN9800GX2 TOP is the only card to crack the 11,000 mark in 3D Mark Vantage which proves its DX10 shading power. The 9800 GX2s are faster than the GTX 260s and ATI's HD 4870 cards and HD 3870 x2 cards. Only the Radeon HD 4870 x2s and the GTX 280s are faster. This being said, we feel that such dual GPU solutions are best avoided until application support is up to par. We do not recommend investing in a 9800 GX2 based card now. There are two reasons for this. One, the GTX 280 is a much newer architecture, and is at par in terms with performance. Secondly this card generates a lot of heat, and the cooling needs special attention. Moreover multi GPU solutions don't always scale linearly in performance.