The past year or so has been quite an exciting one in the graphics card industry. Exactly one year ago, NVIDIA released the G92 graphic processing unit, a die shrink of their flagship processor, G80. This one had held the performance crown for well over a year, but with ATI getting back on track they needed something cheaper to compete in the middle end segment. The GeForce 8800 GT admirably accomplished this role back then. Fast forward to the end of this past summer, the green team ended up, once again in the same situation. Now they needed something to counter the surprisingly affordable Radeon HD 4850 as well as the new Radeon HD 4830 and it had to be rolled out quickly. - Overclockers Club

XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512MB Graphics Board Review

The answer came in the form of their GeForce 9 series, which isn't much more than a bunch of rebadged GeForce 8 series cards. So not a bad plan, it required very little engineering and has a good chance of success thanks to low prices. The card sitting on the bench today is the GeForce 9800 GT coming from XFX, one of the main NVIDIA partners. This particular version is their vanilla version, with stock clocks going at 600MHz for the core and the 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1800MHz. Those are the same speeds offered by the now defunct GeForce 8800 GT so it will be interesting to see what it brings.

With the GeForce 9800 GT, XFX has stayed true to the GeForce 9 series logo on this card. Each and every member of its class has a unique design. This representation has a bandolier of bullets feeding into a ton of various weapons on the front cover letting you know there is alot of firepower snugged inside that box. Additionally, the front cover reveals a core speed of 600MHz, the fact that this card is SLI capable, but not 3-way SLI as this is reserved to higher end cards, and that the full version of Assasin's Creed comes as part of the deal. The rear panel goes into detail on the features as well as showing a render of the card.

The outer panels are really just a sleeve that fits over the inner box which holds the card and contents of the bundle nice and tight. True to form, the inner box proudly sports the colors of the green team and allows the beast to be seen through a window. Just a glimpse through it shows the rendering on the box is the real deal. The card is well packaged and protected, XFX isn't afraid to use plenty of thick foam. The benefits of having video cards well protected cannot be overstated since we have seen some damage on hardware that is not packaged this well. By the way, they offer a double lifetime warranty.

This card features a pair of dual link DVI connectors along with a video output. If you're still living in the analog era, one of those DVI outputs can be converted to analog with the supplied adapter. Heading to the back side of the card, the single 6 pin PCI Express connector will be enough to feed the card with enough juice to unleash all its available firepower. XFX uses mostly solid capacitors except, for some reason, those two on the left. The GeForce 9800 GT doesn't have the possibility to run 3-way SLI, but only a more conservative dual SLI config. But this is very acceptable considering the price these versions are selling at.

The GeForce 8800 GT used to be a good overclocker and we were expecting no less from this XFX card since it's newer and should carry at least some minor component upgrades, even though this one is the vanilla version. We were able to reach a healthy 750MHz on the core, an impressive 150MHz over the stock speed. The GDDR3 memory clocked up to 2124MHz, so right on par with most overclocks. In order to get the clock speeds of 750MHz on the GPU core and 2124MHz on the memory we used an application called RivaTuner, which lets you clock the card high enough not be software limited.

When we got this XFX GeForce 9800 GT video card, we weren't expecting much more than a fancier looking GeForce 8800 GT and that's pretty much what we found out during testing. Both cards use the same G92 core and sport the exact same specifications, whether it is the amount of stream processors or clocks, it's all the same. The performance wasn't only similar, but identical or within the margin of error. However, this card has a huge edge over it's predecessor and that is price. In fact, while the former sold for nearly $300 when it was originally released, this newer part can be found for nearly a third of that price.

While it falls short when it comes to today's performance standards, the card has wicked looks. The black printed circuit board, the cooler's cover and the green DVI ports make an awesome combination. Overall, this XFX GeForce 9800 GT offer last year's performance at today's price. And this is a pretty good deal, but competition is stiff in the mainstream market nowadays and NVIDIA definitely needs to give it's partners something with a bit more power. Indeed, if you can shell out a few more bucks you can grab a card, the Radeon HD 4850 namely, from the red team which will be able to push out more frames while gaming.