With AMD's recent Radeon HD 4850 launch, NVIDIA suddenly lost their good position in the price to performance segment of the graphics card market. To counter this the suggested retail price of the GeForce 9800 GTX has dropped from $269 to $199. And Leadtek as one of NVIDIA's major board partners will be following that pricing model in the near future. Also a new video card has been announced called the GeForce 9800 GTX+, offering higher clock speeds on a slightly die-shrinked GPU. Yeah, a quick turn around from NVIDIA to head to head with ATI and keep their market share on the $200 segment. The Leadtek version follows the reference design as such outlined by NVIDIA. - techPowerUp!

Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX 512MB Version Review

Leadtek ships their WinFast PX9800 GTX board in a brightly colored package that certainly draws attention. And on the back you find some important product highlights and a carrying handle will helps you bring your loot home safely. Like all recent NVIDIA cards, the GeForce 9800 GTX uses a complex cooler that covers the whole card. According to NVIDIA this design philosophy is supposed to deliver more of a product experience than just a graphics card. The cooler design requires two slots for operation. The card has two DVI ports, basically the most common output configuration these days.

The NVIDIA cooler uses a combination of copper and aluminum to keep the card cool. As you can see all the major components like GPU, memory and voltage regulators are cooled by it. All GeForce 9800 GTX cards support SLI with up to three GPU's for increased performance. We are not sure why dual PCI Express power connectors are needed. The GeForce 8800 GT which has similar specs works fine with only one. Anyway, Leadtek includes two adapter cables for these power connectors so you can be up and running in no time, no matter which power supply you have, which is actually a very good option.

NVIDIA's decision to drop the price of their GeForce 9800 GTX series brings them back into the game on the $200 market. However, ATI's new Radeon HD 4850 will give them some competition with all of its new features. Still, at this price point the GeForce 9800 GTX is a viable alternative, it certainly offers the performance you need to play the latest games. Our Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX card showed huge overclocking potential on the core. And if you are an overclocker you can probably make it beat the Radeon HD 4850 after some tweaking. Unlike AMD's new graphics card the overclocking tools are out there.

Another important plus is that all the GeForce 9 series cards support NVIDIA's implementation of PhysX via CUDA. Rumor has it that ATI will add such a feature at a later point too, but it remains to be seen if their version will be a good as NVIDIA's. And as you know this solution is really now coming from NVIDIA, which would make us believe they will always be one step ahead.