If you pulled a random person out of a crowd at your local computer hardware store and asked him or her to name the first fast video card that popped into their head, there is a good chance that their responsive would have the letters GTX in it. The actual last big GTX, the GeForce 8800 GTX, was a radical product that introduced a new unified shader architecture that ushered in a new era of video card performance. But every reign has to end sometime, and now after more than two years, the GeForce 9800 GTX has touched down at our lab. So, probably many are wondering will this new GTX bring the same sort of leap forward? Well XFX is going to help us answer this question. - NeoSeeker

XFX GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB Version Board Review

As you are probably aware, NVIDIA's ninth generation of video cards has only recently appeared. The first ninth series was the GeForce 9600 GT, which had only 64 stream processors, but was able to keep up the pace with the ATI's Radeon HD 3870 and NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT. The second ninth family card on the scene came two weeks ago, with the GeForce 9800 GX2. The GeForce 9800 GX2 impressed us while it was not for everyone with a price tag of over $600, it was a true monster of card, that ripped through games like a Ferrari on fire. Today's GeForce 9800 GTX is the third card coming out of generation nine.

The XFX GeForce 9800 GTX is a very large card, not as monstrous as the GeForce 9800 GX2 or Radeon HD 3870 X2, but almost as big and it'll hang off the end of your motherboard, and take up every millimeter of it's double slot width. Compared to a GeForce 8800 GTX, both PCB's are of the same length, but the cooler on the GeForce 9800 GTX board stretches even further along than its predecessors. In regards to the cooler, the one on the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX is from the standard, reference design which means that XFX have not changed it in anyway which is not always the wat XFX is working with their graphics cards.

One of the reasons that the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX is longer than the GeForce 8800 GT or GTS is that this high-end card has two SLI connectors. With two SLI connectors, if you feel so inclined, you could run up to three GeForce 9800 GTX cards at a time with NVIDIA's 3-Way SLI. That's right, three GeForce 9800 GTX cards can run in SLI. Of course, even if you already have a motherboard with the requisite amount of PCI Express slots you'd probably do not want to drop over $1000 on three cards right now, this feature is nonetheless nice to have, as someday far down the road three GTX cards may be much more affordable.

Although they are hard to make out, the GeForce 9800 GTX video card has in the neighborhood of 754 million transistors. In a calculated effort to help out in much demanding games such as Crysis, the GeForce 9800 GTX has 64 texturing processors, and sixteen render back-end units, capable of creating images at a maximum widescreen resolution. There are two more features of the GeForce 9800 GTX that are particularly worth mentioning. The first is HybridPower. If your motherboard supports this, it will keep the your new GTX in stand-by mode, only bringing it to full power when required by your games and applications.

It's a weird situation to think that the GeForce 9800 GTX is going to become available for the around the same price that the GeFoece 8800 GTX cards are currently going for. But that's that thing to keep in mind with the GeForce 8800 GTX, while it offered a quantum jump in performance over other cards when it came it out, it also initially sold for a price of somewhere between $600 and $650 dollars, whereas the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX is selling for somewhere around $330. It'll be interesting to see if the price of the still fast GeForce 8800 GTX will now plummet, or remain close in price to the GeForce 9800 GTX, for the time being.

In the end, the rest of NVIDIA's current line-up is the GeForce 9800 GTX's own worst enemy, but it can not be denied that the while perhaps not as exciting as the GeForce 8800 GTX was, the GeForce 9800 GTX is a worthy successor to that old performance crown, and while perhaps it is not as ground breaking in its design, the GeForce 9800 GTX is still a damn fine piece of engineering, with enough positive features to leave a lasting impression.