We got some information on why the GeForce 9800 GX2 is delayed until March. There are two main reasons. The board produces a lot of heat, a lot more than the promised 250W and this is not something that system integrators like. The retail and/or etail market expects that this card will run hot, but as long as it runs stable the market shouldn't care about it. Yes, this is not the first time that we will be telling you that the GeForce 9800 GX2 is one hot card. More importantly is the fact that NVIDIA isn't happy with the performance scaling of two of these cards together. And that of course is quite important when competing with the dual-GPU competition of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card. - FudZilla

Why is The GeForce 9800 GX2 Video Board Delayed?

Yes, NVIDIA will somehow kill 3-Way SLI and reintroduce Quad SLI with two of these cards, but it needs to squeeze a bit more performance otherwise it will be the GeForce 7950 GX2 performance fiasco all over again. This was enough to push the card back a few more weeks, and currently the Radeon 3870 X2 definitely looks even more attractive at its $350 retail price. We still don't know the clock speed of the GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card, but we do at least know that it has two G92 GTS chips inside. This means that the card will feature twice 128 shader units, which promises some nice gaming performance.

The reference GeForce 8800 GTS video card works at 650MHz and traditionally NVIDIA clocks its dual cards a bit slower than the single. Still, ATI surprised us all, as its dual card is clocked faster than its single RV670 card, so we are definitely in the dark here. The card is expected in March, probably at the latest at CeBIT, which starts on March the 4th. And yes, many of NVIDIA partners already promised to show these cards and it will be a major delay if NVIDIA orders everyone not to show or launch the GeForce 9800 GX2. Time will tell.