I wrote a review of my 9800GTX a few months ago when I bought it, but didn’t have time to finish and
post it. Here is an abridged version for anyone who’s interested:
After almost imploding with disappointment when I found out the specs of this card, I decided to buy one myself and see if it was any better than I thought. For those who don’t know, the 9800GTX is basically a 512MB 8800GTS with slightly faster core,
RAM and shader clocks. But does it overclock higher (and does performance scale concurrently)? It should in theory due to the superior cooler…..
First a few pics:
A big card as is usual with all Nvidia's GTX variants, reaches all the way across the motherboard, and could give issues to some people by obscuring
SATA ports depending on the particular motherboard.
Now let's have a look how it performs..... I generally tested games at 1920 x 1200. This is because it is my monitor’s resolution. Apart from that blatant bias, testing every resolution would be simply have been too time consuming.
Test Setup:
Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP;
E6600 @ 2.4GHz;
2 x 2GB Ballistix Tracer Red;
WD Raptor 150GB;
Corsair HX620W;
Windows XP Home;
BFG 512MB 9800GTX;
EVGA 640MB 8800GTS ACS3;
I used the second
GFX card as a basis for comparison for two reasons: to see if I had got much improvement for my money by buying the 9800, and to see if the extra
RAM and memory bus width had any effect on performance at both low and high resolutions. Overclocking was done using Rivatuner 2.08 and ATi Tool to test for artifacts.
Stock speeds for this card are:
Core clock: 675 MHz;
RAM clock: 1100 MHz;
Shader clock: 1688MHz.
The initial results from overclocking the GTX were
675 -->
765 core clock,
1100 -->
1175 RAM, and
1688 -->
1913 shaders. I then took manual control of the fan speed and increased it to 75%. This allowed the core to reach 818MHz, the
RAM 1207MHz, and the shaders 1996MHz. These were the scores when overclocking each area individually, so to get them all stable together I had to settle for:
Core clock: 802 MHz;
RAM clock: 1163 MHz;
Shader clock: 1964MHz.
Not bad at all for a stock cooler. Load temps were around 55C running Ati tool’s fuzzy-cube torture test.
I benched a few games using this and the 8800GTS 640, here are some results:
As you can see, the overclocking didn’t have much of an effect on overall performance, a few FPS at best even though the core and shader clocks were boosted by around 18%. And it’s also alarming how little of an improvement the 9800GTX is over the 8800GTS 640 seeing as it was released over 18 months later! I suppose it’s no surprise at high resolutions considering the memory bus is narrower than the GTS’s (256 bit vs 320 bit) and considering that it has slightly less
RAM too…… the only good thing to come out of that was that Nvidia passed on the lower manufacturing costs of these cards as they were only £210 on release……
Conclusion: not much of a step forward on release, and now there are Ati 4850s available that have better performance for £115….. if you are an Nvidia fan though and can’t afford a GTX 260, these are available for £130 at the moment.
9800GTX mini-review
) back in april, had it sitting around doing nothing till I built my watercooled pc in may(the 9800gtx is being watercooled). I still haven't tested it with games yet as I've been busy overclocking the Q9450 to see if I could get it to 3.6Ghz, managed to get it prime95 stable for 17hrs(plus had a 10day holiday as well).
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