We have all had our pockets first picked by rising gas prices, then have received a swift kick in the balls by gutted investments and finally getting a slap to the face by the rising prices of damn near everything. This beatdown has led nearly every industry to the realization that the average consumer either can't or just doesn't want to afford the best of the best anymore. We see this playing out quite well in the computer component industry with falling prices and more value oriented products. Gone are the days of the $800 GPU, they have been replaced by efficient, lower cost products which appeal to a broader market while still achieving performance numbers to be proud of. - Hardware Canucks

EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB Graphics Review

Manufacturers like NVIDIA and ATI have perfectly seeded this changed market with a plethora of graphics cards which won't put you out of your rent money since they focus on a bang for buck factor everyone seems to be happy with. Let's be honest, the $150 to $250 price range is the place to be right now as evidenced by the massive number of products all clustered within a mere $100 price bracket. ATI has their new Radeon HD 4830 and HD 4850 while NVIDIA has the GeForce 9600 GT, GeForce 9800 GT and GTX+ versions. And today we will be looking at the GeForce 9800 GTX+ edition coming from EVGA.

Basically, NVIDIA had an excellent card on the market with the GeForce 9800 GTX until ATI released their Radeon HD 4850 and rained all over the parade. An answer was needed and the boys in green wanted to show that they too could release a 55nm chip. While power consumption and heat production are not supposed to go down significantly when making the jump from 65nm to 55nm, the change allowed the newly minted GeForce 9800 GTX+ version to be clocked higher than the outgoing GTX edition. This meant better competition against the Radeon HD 4850 while keeping cost increases to a minimum.

The new plus version of the GeForce 9800 GTX has been a hit ever since. If you like lime green then you will love this packaging design since the green just oozes from it. Not only will it catch your eye in a store but EVGA has used the space very well by conveying all of the necessary information while being constrained by a relatively small amount of space. We all know that companies needed to quickly implement the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and EVGA just stuck a plus sticker to their standard GeForce 9800 GTX packaging and called it a day. And this doesn't bother us really and reusing old boxes is always good.

It looks like a regular GeForce 9800 GTX, it even smells like one too but as you will see in a bit, lurking under that heatsink is something a bit different. All in all though, which you are looking at is a carbon copy of a stock GeForce 9800 GTX with a funky new sticker on it. When it was released, there were many people who lambasted the GeForce 9800 GTX+ for being just another take on a product that should have been left as it was. It is amazing how times change since now that NVIDIA's answer to the Radeon HD 4850 has had time to mature driver wise and has really found its niche in today's market.

It performs extremely well in nearly every game up to reasonably high resolution and at around $230 before some rebates, it offers the perfect mix of price and performance for those of you on a budget. There really is a hell of a lot to like about the EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GTX+ and from where we are standing, there aren't many negatives at all. What really amazed us was the fact that the 55nm manufacturing process netted more efficiency than we originally thought it would. Even though it seems like the 55nm implementation has somewhat stalled on NVIDIA's part, what we saw is definitely heartening.

Usually we don't drop any bombshells in articles and try to keep conclusions as neutral as possible when comparing a product to the competition but with this one, that all changes. In our humble opinion, the mix of performance, price, warranty, well known customer service and a myriad of other things make the EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GTX+ edition a better buy than any Radeon HD 4850 on the market today.