Just like any other industry, computer hardware has its trends and fashions, and at the moment it well and truly seems that black is the new black. Ever since AMD launched their multiplier unlocked Black edition Phenom CPU's, there seem to be more companies looking to get in on that particular trend. The latest company to make use of this Black edition moniker is XFX, and today we'll be taking a look at a board boasting just such a name. The subject of our article is the GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition, which makes use of the latest, die shrunk version of NVIDIA's now well entrenched G92 chipset, throws in some factory overclocks and ships with a bundled copy of Far Cry 2 game. - Elite Bastards

XFX GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB Black Edition Review

While NVIDIA's G92 architecture originally found itself using the 65 nanometre manufacturing process, the G92b core we find on the GeForce GTX 9800 GTX+ actually gains a die shrink to 55 nanometre, bringing with it all of the usual benefits of a die shrink, such as improved power consumption and heat output. The basic architecture of the G92 remains unchanged from the G80, meaning that a full G92 core contains 128 stream processors, with unified technology, configured in clusters of sixteen shaders, together with sixteen texturing units, giving both sixtyfour texturing addressing and filtering units.

Broadly speaking, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ not only replaces the GeForce 9800 GTX, but also gives it a pretty decent clock speed boost in the process. Thus, a reference GeForce 9800 GTX+ sports a core clock speed of 738MHz, with a shader clock of 1836MHz. The memory clocks remain the same between the GeForce 9800 GTX and GTX+ cards however, with the use of 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 2200MHz. While it isn't trying to live up to the standards set by their XXX range of boards, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition does sport some modest factory overclocks against a reference board.

Oddly, these clock speed changes actually sees the GPU core clock increase slightly, but this is more than compensated for by an increase in the board's shader clock to 1900MHz. Finally, the 512MB of GDDR3 memory on-board finds itself with a 50MHz speed bump, giving it a final memory clock of 2300MHz. As per normal for any XFX part, NVIDIA's reference cooler is utilised for the Black Eeition, giving us a dual slot affair which fits snugly across the entire front of the PCB. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ requires a couple of 6-pin PCI Express power connectors to feed it, so you'll need to make sure you have enough connectivity.

We've already noted that XFX's GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition features some modest factory overclocks, so is there much overclocking headroom left in our particular sample? From those modest factor overclocks, we managed some further and equally modest additional overclocking ourselves. For starters, we managed to push our board's G92b core clock up to 812MHz speed. This in turn increased the board's shader core to 1965MHz and the 512MB of GDDR3 on the video card fared pretty well, with a 120MHz clock speed increase to take it up to 2420MHz effective at its final, stable clock which is a nice improvement.

Taking a look at NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX+ in isolation, what you have is a very solid piece of hardware in terms of both performance and functionality. We're sure most of you reading this already know well what the G92 is capable of, and its 55nm G92b refresh brings a cooler, smaller and higher clocked part to the table which finds itself capable of powering most titles at medium widescreen with some level of anti-aliasing, while also offering such NVIDIA centric benefits as PhysX support into the bargain. The question is whether all else is actually equal, or is there a better choice to be made at a similar price and performance?

While the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a competent piece of hardware that really doesn't disappoint in what it offers any potential buyer, it's hard not to cast envious glances across the aisle at AMD's Radeon HD 4850 part, which can generally match or best the GeForce 9800 GTX+ at with anti-aliasing enabled, while also proving to be somewhat cheaper than XFX's offering in the process. Personally, given this choice we'd lean towards the Radeon HD 4850, but if you find the GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition's features and bundle more tempting then we can't say you'd be disappointed with the performance it offers either.