You have got to love how much diversity there is on the market when it comes to product choices. Face it, manufacturers are milking anything these days. Where overclocking used to be a taboo in the hardware arena as a feature a couple of years ago, these day's it's good business. And that's okay as such, as when a manufacturer pre-overclocks a card for you you get to keep the benefit of your warranty. King of pre-overclocked products has to be XFX, their speed-bin of releasing overclocked products is exceedingly fast. We do not think that there is an XFX product out there that is not available as a triple X edition or other series name slapped on top of it. - Guru3D

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Black Bis-G92 Edition Review

Today will be no different, we received XFX's top of the shelf product, the GeForce 9800 GX2. The cool thing is that this is the new mystified named Black edition series of cards, meaning it comes with a nice pre-overclock and a lovely game bundle. You guys are familiar with abbreviations like SLI and CrossFire. In a very short layman explanation, this is the technology that NVIDIA is applying at the GeForce 9800 GX2 card, it's a very fast and relatively cheap to develop method to produce a fast performing product. And yes, everything is doubled up yet bound to one big cooler sitting in the middle between the two GPU's.

The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Black edition board is as stated a pre-overclocked version of the reference model. So where the reference models have a 600Mhz core, 1500MHz shader processor and 2000MHz memory frequency respectively the Black edition runs a vast amount faster. The core frequency of both the GPU's utilized are clocked at 700MHz, the shader processors at 1674MHz and the memory at 2106MHz effective. Fact is that given the right circumstances this GX2 will beat one GeForce 8800 Ultra by a significant margin. And that makes things really interesting. What's interesting is that the GX2 is SLI compatible.

As always we start with the packaging first, so you know what to look for in the stores. And some pretty cool design by the way, XFX matched the Black edition theme quite well. Keep a close eye on that cooler. It are pretty much two boards, interconnected with each other. In the middle one cooling unit is disposing heat for both GPU's. So imagine two PCB's, of which both the GPU covers pointing inwards. Hidden behind a little plastic clip we get access to the SLI connector. Normally we would say it was there for aesthetic reasons, yet we're leaning more towards cooling and airflow really which is very important.

The GeForce 9800 GX2 remains a really interesting card. The overall performance is definitely the best money can buy right now. But with multiple GPU's often also the more common SLI issues pop up. There definitely will be games where that 2nd GPU will not kick in. See, with a single GPU solution you are bound to have very few issues. With two GPU things tend to get more complicated, from a practical as well as technical side. That aside, our biggest worry for this card remains heat build-up. Trust us when we say that though the GPU's remains at acceptable temperatures, you now have two of them disposing that residual heat.

We also just have to mention this, for a GeForce 9800 GX2 to reach 700MHz that's quite something. XFX make selections of their products, and are testing their product pretty rigorously, only with a very stringent and low-yield approach they select these Black editions by first selecting the normal yields, then the tripe X editions and finally the gems that pass all performance, heat and stability tests combined becoming the Black editions. This selection is what will make this more expensive. Whether you believe it's worth that kind of money is totally upto you, heck we won't blame you as the result is some extreme gaming fun.