If there's one thing that's more true today than ever, it's that you can get some incredible gaming performance for not too much money. Taking a look at a GPU like a GeForce 9600 GT can prove that. At about $80, it's affordable for almost anyone, yet can handle some games with modest settings just fine at super high resolutions. There's definite value in GPU's today, and it's great to see. The next step-up from the previously mentioned card is of course the GeForce 9800 GT, which features a slower core and shader frequencies, but almost doubles the number of cores, effectively giving us a card that's close to being equivalent to the original GeForce 9800 GTX, save for higher frequencies. - Techgage

ASUS GeForce 9800 GT Matrix Graphics Card Review

Given these specs, it's hard to give a general percentage of performance increase we should see over the GeForce 9600 GT, but for the extra $20 the card costs, the value might be far greater. As it stands today, there are four GPU's that cover this particular price range. NVIDIA has their GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GT, while ATI has their Radeon HD 4830 and Radeon HD 4670. Sadly, we don't have either of the latter cards available to use, but it's likely safe to say that the performance differences between each card at its respective price range shouldn't be too great. And as such provide very similar gaming performance.

The card we are taking a look at today comes from ASUS, and is directly battling against ATI's HD Radeon 4830. And both cards hover around the $100 area, with some of the NVIDIA cards going even lower depending on the brand and mail-in rebate. ASUS is a company that's likely familiar to everyone, for varying reasons. The most important one is that generally speaking, most of their products are solid. We've had very few in our labs over the course of the past few years that have really let us down, and that's rare to see from anyone. And that is really a great value, as it gives you a certain confidence in their products.

We might not find the card that attractive, but it's all a matter of opinion, and you might disagree. What we do like is this cool looking fin array towards the end of the card. The leaf blower fan inside sweeps air both through these fins and also towards the back. This is an interesting design, and one we like quite a bit. It allows more air to be pushed away from the card faster, rather than designs that only push it towards the back. To the immediate right of the row of capacitors underneath the fan are three power phases. This is a feature we have seen only from Palit for quite some time, but it's good to see others catching on.

Now one of ASUS' selling points on this card is their iTracker software, which is essentially a tuning application that lets you increase temperature thresholds, clocks and even voltages. The overall design is very clunky, but once you use it for a few minutes and understand where things are located and how to increase the clocks, it's easier to deal with. That all said, while the default clocks on this card are 612MHz core, 1500MHz shader and 1800MHz memory speed, with our maximum stable overclock being 720MHz core, 1750MHz shader and 1800MHz memory. The memory is 1850MHz, so we didn't bother tweaking it too much.

From a value standpoint, the GeForce 9800 GT is a great card. Most such cards hover around the $100 area, which makes it appropriate since many GeForce 9600 GT's can be had for around $80. The performance differences between the two aren't major as you'd expect given the majorly increased number of cores, but it's a good boost nonetheless. In the case of this particular card, we'd have to say it's not worth the cost of entry. It currently retails for $149, and for almost the same price, you could score a much faster GeForce 9800 GTX+ version. So the pricing isn't in favor of the Matrix edition, though it has other strong features.

What ASUS' card does offer is extremely low noise when at idle. It's so quiet, you'd swear it was using a passive cooler. Still given the cost, it almost would have been nice to see an actual passive cooler, because at least then this card would have a very important redeeming feature. All in all, the GeForce 9800 GT is a good card for the money, and delivers a great value. But for even better value, this particular model should be avoided. ASUS themselves offer other GeForce 9800 GT's that cost less than this, which aside from the cooler, has almost identical specs to this one and similar performance.