It seems that the days of paying $600 for a video card is over for the time being. With ATI battling NVIDIA for supremacy in performance it has caused the pricing of both card manufacturers to hit a long time low. We know many of you will remember just a few years back when in order to get a GeForce 8800 Ultra you had to fork out $800. Not that is just plain ridiculous. Now ATI's top card will cost you about $525 for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and on the NVIDIA side you have the GeForce GTX 280 which can be had for roughly $425. Even with the drops we are seeing in video cards these top of the line models can be out of reach for many like myself. So, we must opt for a much cheaper alternative. - Pro-Clockers

Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB Video Board Review

The alternative is not a bad thing as many video cards in the $200 can play the most demanding games with no problems. This is good news for us on a budget. At this range in pricing you can either get you a blazing fast Radeon HD 4850 from ATI or a killer performing GeForce 9800 series from NVIDIA. Both can give you all the frame rates you want in your favorite shooter games. This leads us to today's article which is about the Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ edition. The overall specifications of the GeForce 9800 GTX+ are very similar to the GTX with a few differences. The main difference is the reduction of the GPU die size.

After months of playing second fiddle to AMD when it came down to die size NVIDIA finally got with the program and reduced their's to 55nm. This meant a few things to the consumer one being less power consumption. And for those that really like numbers higher clocks came along for the ride. How does 745/2200MHz sound? We figured you would like that. Palit has a couple more features that will win you over if these first couple don't. With the shrink things are supposed to be better all around with the GeForce 9800 GTX+. Not only do you benefit from the higher clocks, but also less power consumption.

And in the case of this GPU you also get a non reference heatsink. Which still remains a dual slot configuration but the extra long cooler is just dismissed somewhat shortening the length of the card. The older reference cooler that once exhausted out the back of the case is replaced by one that more compact and should perform much better with a well vented case. All of the improvements from the GeForce 9800 GTX lays underneath the new cooler of the GeForce 9800 GTX+ version. All beginning with the smaller die which shrinks to 55nm. This may not mean much in the beginning but at the end of the month it does.

The whole overclocking process was done in stages that included first finding the maximum overclock of the core. Once that pain staking process was completed we moved over to the memory side to see how fast we could get it. After this was done we had to work to see what the max was when trying to overclock them together. Well it all ended at an incredible 856MHz on the shrunken core and 2512MHz on the memory. To say the least we were very impressed with these numbers. But what we were more impressed with was the final speed on the shader. At 2124MHz shaders it will perform great if you start the GPU folding.

When the GeForce 9800 GTX+ card was released to the world it was done so to compete with ATI's Radeon HD 4850. And from the testing we have done we feel that the Radeon HD 4850 would have a hard time competing with the GeForce 9800 GTX+ just by how well it performed against the other cards, like the Radeon HD 4870. The testing clearly showed that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ was within fifteen percent of the numbers of the ATI counterpoint. This is enought to justify the $200 asking price from respectable online stores. We see is that this card is capable of playing all the latest video games at more than respectable levels.

NVIDIA did a good thing when they decided to shrink and move on from the 65nm fabrication process. And this shows in the higher 738/2200MHz clock speeds. The overclocking numbers we achieved were without a doubt very interesting as we added another 100MHz to the core and memory speeds making for a greater increase in gaming performance. In final parting we would say if you are in the market for an above average gaming card the GeForce 9800 GTX+ from Palit maybe right up your alley. And as the performance to dollar ratio is definately an advantage, we wouldn't need to think twice.