Another day and another new product from NVIDIA. Today sees the introduction of the GeForce 9800 GT, priced to compete against AMD's Radeon HD 3870 and the Radeon 4850 cards. So what is the GeForce 9800 GT? Well we can of cours already say that it is the new die shrink to 55nm that should bring NVIDIA back in the game. And that means that NVIDIA is getting around to getting some more and greater experience and to leverage this afterwards towards their GT200 chips. That means that NVIDIA is fianlly catching up on technology and we should see some good progress in the very near future. Why is its introduction important, and how is it likely to perform? - Hexus

BFG GeForce 9800 GT 512MB OC Video Card Preview

NVIDIA feels eminently comfortable in raising the nomenclature without adding a whole heap to an existing architecture. And specifically, the GeForce 9800 GT is based on the 55nm manufacturing process that was debuted with the GeForce 9800 GTX+ version, a product that is only now coming into retail availability. The 55nm production makes the GeForce 9 series card cheaper to produce, because they can fit more on to a given sized wafer. The clock speeds, remain exactly the same as the volume selling GeForce 8800 GT, although we expect partners to launch the usual cavalcade of pre-overclocked cards.

Most models, we believe will ship with a 512MB frame buffer, just like this one. And BFG clock their OC version in at 625MHz for the core, then 1566MHz for the shaders and 1800MHz for the GDDR3 memory. It's a conservative overclock, given the 55nm process used. If we didn't know any better, this is an exercise in like for like replacements. As well a single SLI connector means that you can attach another card and run two board SLI config. There's nothing much to say about the GeForce 9800 GT that hasn't been covered with the GeForce 8800 GT. We hope that el-cheapo models come in at around $150.