Not being able to think of a better sentence, we think NVIDIA shit in their pants when AMD released the Radeon HD 4850 at the price they did. The performance of AMD's little card certainly raised the standard for a medium-end card and NVIDIA swiftly reacted by announcing the GeForce 9800 GTX+ GPU which is, simply put a die shrunked and overclocked version of the GeForce 9800 GTX. This 55nm GPU runs at stock speeds of 738MHz for the core and 1836MHz for shaders. With us today, we have Zotac’s AMP! edition of the card which is a term that Zotac uses for their overclocked cards. Zotac has upped the core clock to 756MHz, shaders to 1890MHz while memory runs at 2300MHz. - t-break

Zotac GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! Style Edition Review

Zotac uses an orange box with a dragon on the front which looks nice and should catch the eye of a potential buyer. Inside, we found user manuals, a drivers CD, etc. Needless to say, that Zotac has certainly packed their card with all the accessories you would need. The Zotac GeForce 9800 GTX+ looks like any other GeForce 9800 GTX cards as Zotac uses the NVIDIA stock heatsink and fan but with Zotac sticker on top. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ has two SLI connector and thus supports two as well as 3-way SLI mode. Like any high-end card today, you can find two dual link DVI ports on the rear that supports widescreen resolutions.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ card needs dual 6-pin power cables to power it and if you don't have one of the newer power supplies that supports these type of connectors natively, you can use the molex connector included in Zotac's packaging. We removed the heatsink off the card to reveal the PCB and see the smaller sized G92 chipset. The design, as expected is identical to the original GeForce 9800 GTX. This card is equipped with eight of Samsung 0.8ns high-end GDDR3 memory chips which are rated to operate at 2400MHz with 1.8V to keep up the speed and deliver outstanding frame buffering and memory bandwidth.

Even though the AMP edition comes overclocked out of the box, we decided to see if it overclocks any further. The core overclocked to 800MHz while we were able to achieve 2000MHz speed on shaders and 2380MHz on memory clock. Temperatures were steady at 50°C idle at stock and 55°C in overclocked while under load the temperatures jumped to 66°C which is not very hot, especially compared to the new AMD GPU's that run over 70°C and tend be hotter chips. The performance posted by the card was a bit surprising and we're betting that part of that has to do with the new drivers with PhysX support.

Generally, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ posted similar scores to the GeForce 9800 GTX with some tests higher and some lower. Thus, we think that getting a GeForce 9800 GTX is probably a better option cost wise with it being cheaper. Of course, at that price point, the Radeon HD 4850 is also a serious contender for your money. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ does run cooler than the original GeForce 9800 GTX which helps it overclock better. Zotac does a good job with their GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! edition which is pre-overclocked and comes with a full game. Its available now at local market at the price of around $270.