We started a term when the GeForce 9800 GTX was first released known as yet another NVIDIA launch. Basically it's a derogatory term poking fun at a company that produces a lot of different brands and products, and some with very little separating them from a technical perspective. Yesterday news started leaking about a new GPU from NVIDIA called the GeForce 9800 GTX+, essentially an overclocked G92 part built on a new 55nm process technology that will sell at a lower price than current GeForce 9800 GTX cards on the market. Interested yet? Compared to the current GeForce 9800 GTX that runs at 675/2200MHz clocks, the new GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a considerable bump in speed. - PC Perspective

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB Graphics Preview

What makes this all possible? The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is the 55nm refresh of the G92, and with all current GeForce 9800 series cards are built on 65nm technology. NVIDIA is pitting this new card, set to be available in the middle of July, squarely at the momentum of the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 cards from AMD. The real question you might be asking is why would NVIDIA not want to push the point home about the GeForce 9800 GTX+ being a 55nm part? Obviously there are some advantages to it, lower power, less heat, and faster clocks, they're probably using the 55nm shrink of the G92 core as a practice run.

We guess is that the marketing team at big green didn't want to one-up the recently released GT200 parts. Some people might assume that since it was built on the 65nm process while the new GeForce 9800 GTX+ is on the 55nm, that the GT200 would be inferior in some way and that's obviously not the case. We will be curious to see how the 55nm transition of the GT200 part goes, if NVIDIA will try to make significant modifications in the design before production or simply attempt to ramp it up as soon as possible to help and reduce costs and being able to produce better yields.

What is kind of surprising is that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ actually is using more power than the original GeForce 9800 GTX card. This tells us that NVIDIA basically wiped out any power advantages and savings they got with the 55nm product by pushing the clocks up to improve performance. Obviously we were expecting these results to be quite different, with the power savings and performance improvement for the new G92b over the G92. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ isn't even schedule to show up in the channel until the middle part of July giving AMD a larger window of opportunity than we initially thought.

While we are really not a fan of doing these rough cut previews of products, the schedules from AMD and NVIDIA more or less dictated it for this instance. The joy of launch dates and changes is something we wish upon no one. We did get some interesting information from it all though, the AMD Radeon HD 4850 and the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ appear to be nearly equally matched in price and performance.