Box contents
The card comes with the game Lost, two molex PCI-E cables, SPDIF cable, S-Video - Composite cabel, DVI-VGA adapter and DVI-HDMI adapter. There is a user's manual and a CD with Nvidia drivers.
Specifications
The length of the card is 10.5 inches(26.66cm) which is longer than the width of the ATX board. G92-420 is the last revision of the chip and it's made in 65nm process. It has 754 million transistors and 128 stream processors. The GPU clock is 675MHz, and shaders are at 1688MHz. It comes with 512MB of Samsung's GDDR3 memory (K4J52320E 0J08 - 0.8ms) which is clocked at 1100MHz (2200 effectively), over a 256-bit bus. The theoretical bandwidth is 43.2 Gbps. The model which the 9800GTX replaces, the 8800GTX, had 681 million transistors, worked at 575MHz for the GPU and 1350MHz for the shaders. It had 784MB of memory clocked at 900MHz (1800MHz effectively) over a 384-bit bus. The card has two DVI-I outs, and one TV-out (HDTV). It supports HDCP, and HDMI is supported over HDMI-DVI adapters and SPDIF audio conectors on the PCB (on top of the card, close to the SLI conector). It supports 3-way SLI. Maximum TDP for the 9800GTX is 160W. Nvidia recommends 450W power supply for one card, 750W for two and 1000W if you decide to have 3-way SLI.
Overclocking and temperature
9800GTX is a solid overclocker. The GPU overclocks from the default 675MHz to 840MHz, which is 24.4%, and the memory went from the default 1100MHz to 1200MHz, which is 9.1%. The overclocking was done with the fan set to 100%, and it makes a lot of noise when set to work on 100% power.
Temperatures:
Idle: 49°C (120°F)
Load: 68°C (154.4°F)
Benchmark results
3DMARK
9800GTX OC - 13880 marks
9800GTX - 12815 marks
Crysis (1280x1024 DX10)
9800GTX OC - 50.22 fps
9800GTX - 43.55 fps
Enemy Teritory Quake Wars (1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF)
9800GTX OC - 104.2 fps
9800GTX - 91.1 fps
F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate (1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF)
9800GTX OC - 131 fps
9800GTX - 112 fps
Conclusion
The 65nm process allows better overclocking, and we will probably see a lot of factory overclocked models of this card in the future. If you are looking for a high end graphics card but don't want to spend too much money, than this might be the card for you. Performance in directX 10 games has finally improved and the card plays Crysis in DX10 at 1280x1024 at a respectable framerate. If you want to turn on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, you would probably need to buy two cards in SLI. Although it doesn't bring anything revolutionary and new, the 9800GTX is great card with good overclocking potential. The recommended price of the card is between 299 and 349 USD.
Links
