Another day, another article and today we got ASUS's latest GeForce 9800 GT Matrix card on our bench with DirectX 10 support and 512MB of GDDR3 video memory so this should be a interesting product as we are going to compare it some other high performing cards on the market right now. The GeForce 9800 GT is however nothing more than the older GeForce 8800 GT, even though it comes powered with two different GPU's. Either the good old 65mm G92 which has been already used extensively or the newer 55nm G92 version with some optimizations. The latter version is of course the better, generating less heat and able to be clocked higher and turning out to be faster. - Red & Blankness

ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix Video Board Review

The box as usual is quite big and the card itself is also bigger than the mid-end cards. On the back you can read about the main features of the card in various languages. This card has one of the biggest coolers we have seen for awhile. It has a nice black cooler with a bigger fan to keep the noise down. The card only requires one PCI Express power cable but it does take up one extra spot in the back of the computer. If we look close at the card we can see that there are heatpipes going on the top of the card which means that the heatpipes connect heatsink under the cover and move the heat out to the front of the card.

This far the card has performed quite well but alot of people also want to know how they overclock. This card came at a core setting of 615MHz and a memory setting of 1800MHz. As always we use RivaTuner for our overclocking and with the core we were able to boost it to 710MHz which gives a few points raise when you run 3DMark. Memory on the other hand went a bit higher as we were able to run it artifact and lock free at a whooping 2200MHz. We are more than satisfied with the overclocking results, you can boost your card to be faster than the GX2 card, meaning at least in clock speeds settings.

The phone sells for about $200 which is a tad lower than the faster GeForce 9800 cards but with the overclocking possibilities we can really recommend this card. It really outperformed a Radeon HD 4850 card from ATI which cost only $30 less so we think the choice is quite obvious. The card would not suite for a home theatre PC due to the size or the noise but for a normal setup we think this card is quite good noise wise. It is not the quietest card from ASUS but it is not bad. It was otherwise well packed, it has performed stable during our benchmarks and installation was a piece of cake with excellent driver support.

Price is good and performance is very good even when compared to the GeForce 9800 GX2 card from ASUS that sells for around $400. This meas that this somehow special version does come with an extra value, with their own cooling solution and higher clock settings. We will for sure give this our recommendation for superb performance and overclocking.