Technology World!

NVIDIA usually pleases the enthusiast community with their product launches, and no launch has been more memorable lately than the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphic card launch more than eighteen months ago. So when the 9800 GTX product line launched on April 1st, 2008 there was a lot of commotion surrounding the new crown prince. With such a successful debut of the 8800 GTX back in 2006, the level of enthusiast skepticism surrounding the new 9800 GTX was unquestionably high. First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level GeForce 9800 GX2 which utilized two G92 GPU cores. Yet title of fastest single-GPU video card remains the honor of NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GTX. Benchmark Reviews has already helped launch this product, and now we’re back to test the performance of Foxconn’s new GeForce 9800 GTX OC Edition 512MB video card 9800GTX-512N.

Since several of the former heavyweight products are now threatened with replacement by the new GeForce 9800 GTX, there seems to be a lot of concern as to how well it performs against the older 8800 GTX and Ultra which it supersedes. Gamers want to know if the GX2 is worth the money, or if they should wait. Making this decision a little more difficult is yet another change to the upcoming graphics market.

Powered by the NVIDIA G92 graphics processor originally introduced with the GeForce 8800 GT series, the Foxconn GeForce 9800 GTX Standard OC Edition video card takes the GeForce family one step higher. The new PCI Express 2.0 interface sends data at rates up to 5.0 GBps, which then uses the memory bus to build a 512 MB video frame buffer for smoother performance and realistic textures in PC games. The 1100 MHz GDDR3 video memory on the GTX communicates with the 685 MHz G92 graphics processor through a 256-bit memory interface. For an extra performance boost during intense gaming situations, NVIDIA has designed the GTX to offer 128 stream processors operating at 1713 MHz.

Compared to the older PCI Express x16 bus which it replaces, the new PCI Express 2.0 interface delivers 5.0 GBps of graphical bandwidth which amounts to twice the data throughput over the previous generation. In the new generation of PCI Express 2.0 compatible motherboards, such as the Gigabyte’s GA-X48T-DQ6 which we used for testing, this new technology delivers bleeding edge graphics while remaining backwards compatible with older PCI Express x16 motherboards.

In the past, Benchmark Reviews has compared GeForce 8800 Graphics Performance: GT vs GTS vs GTX. In that article, it was shown that a more affordable 8800 GT could easily beat a heavily-overclocked 8800 GTS and close the gap with far more expensive 8800 GTX. Not much later we tested the ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT AMP! Edition HDMI video card which in many tests performed very near to the more expensive 8800 GTX. But now that the 9800 series has its third product offering it seems as though the 8800 series is so… last generation. But don’t think that the new name will somehow convince us that it will be an inherently better product; we still plan to test just how the new 9800 GTX fits into all of this.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I bought my first discrete graphics card to outfit an overclocked Cyrix M2-300 6×86MX-based computer. Back in those Windows 98 (first edition) days of 1998 the term GeForce wasn’t even in existence yet, and NVIDIA was called referred to as nVidia. So when I bought my first computer late that year, I would have never thought Quake II played on my RIVA TNT2 AGP video card would mark the last time I would spend money in an arcade. This was nearly ten years ago and since that time NVIDIA has developed several successful GeForce product lines, including the newly launched 9th generation.

Many hardware enthusiasts have already read the early leaked reviews surrounding the 9800 GTX, and have been asking some important questions about NVIDIA’s newest product. Because the list of improvements is not exactly a major step up from previous products, gamers are wondering why they should make the move. Here’s NVIDIA’s answer to that question:

• Unprecedented performance at the $299-$349 price point.
• NVIDIA 3-way SLI Technology for the ultimate performance in DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and OpenGL games.
• NVIDIA HybridPower technology - users can switch off the graphics card while not playing intense 3D games, saving power.
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology - enjoy all your HD movies with smooth playback, high image quality, and advanced post processing.

Benchmark Reviews will test the new Foxconn GeForce 9800 GTX Standard OC Edition 512MB video card 9800GTX-512N against the most widely used NVIDIA products it competes against.

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