With the release of the newest Batman movie, there has been a lot of talk about the Dark Knight lately, so much so that ASUS decided to name a custom card using the same name. This card has four heatpipes. Heatpipes have been proven on many occasions to help the flow of heat immensely. Rarely do you ever see heatpipes used on any video card, even special edition cards. Heatpipes are usually reserved for the best after market GPU coolers. It should be interesting to see how these heatpipes affect overclocking. What would the Dark Knight name be without a cool design to go with it? That is why ASUS has painted the GPU cooler a cool black silverish color along with a blue stylish PCB. - Bjorn3D

ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Dark Knight Board Review

We feel that ASUS really succeeds with the look of the Dark Knight, but can it perform just as good as the true Dark Knight? With the custom GPU cooler, ASUS hopes that you will be able to overclock your heart out with this card, and thus achieve higher frame rates. As many of us know, generally, if you lower temperatures, your max overclock will be increased. With higher overclocks more performance is possible. Today, we will see if this cooler is up to the task of doing a lot of overclocking, and ultimately performing better than ATI's competing card, the Radeon HD 4850 graphics accelerator within the same segment.

Judging from a specs perspective, the Radeon HD 4850 is the winner, but we all know how well these stats reflect real world performance. Though the GeForce 9800 GTX+ has a much lower stream processor count, its shaders are clocked higher, thus making up for the fact that there are fewer of them. All of the cards are of the smaller 55nm manufacturing process. The box is pretty standard. On the front of the box, ASUS shows off their four heatpipes, and call it enthusiastic. They also show that it is PCI Express 2.0, along with the video memory. On the back they go into more detailed stats, including them in eleven languages.

This card was very nicely packaged. Having the ASUS logo on the top was a nice touch. The card board was quite thin, but felt very durable. As you can see ASUS has taken the basic card and just put a different cooler on it. The fan is of some interest to me. ASUS claims that it is nearly silent. This could either mean it is a cheap fan that doesn't blow a lot of air, or a good quality fan that is built to be quiet. If you compare this cooler to the Zalman VF1000 you will notice that they are quite close in design. Taking that in mind, this video card should cool exceptionally well. The outlet remains the same as the default version.

This card has two PCI Express connectors. Make sure that your power supply at least has one 6-pin connector. You do not want to run this card with two molex to PCI Express connectors. Take note that the Radeon HD 4850 only requires one PCI Express connector. That would most likely mean that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ requires more power to run. This card also features two SLI connectors. This will allow you to run three of these cards in SLI provided you have a motherboard that supports that feature. And ASUS was kind enough to include covers so the SLI connector doesn't get damaged.

The stock clocks for this card are 740MHz and 2200MHz respectively. And we reached 835MHz, which is quite a good overclock on the core. That's almost a 100MHz increase. The memory was really more of a disappointment, with not even a MHz increase. There are many good things that accompany the ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Dark Knight edition. It is the culmination of many high-end features that are sure to help you play all of the latest titles at max without a hint of lag, and stay extremely cool while doing it. The cooler on this board is very nice, and is of quality construction, we love the way the paint looks.

Don't count this card out for overclocking either. With the help of the Dark Knight cooler, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is able to overclock very far. This will certianly give you a few more frames, and help to make some of the most demanding games playable in the most demanding of fire fights. Overall we feel that the ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Dark Knight is a very good and capable card to play anything you throw at it. There was no point in testing that we felt like it was a serious let down, in fact the opposite is true. This graphics card kept up with a overclocked Radeon HD 4850, and on a few occasions managed to beat it.

Another great point about this card is its price. It is on par with prices of normal GeForce 9800 GTX+'s yet it has the much better cooler. This will certainly prove to be an attractive offer for anyone looking to put some life back into their gaming computer. The ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Dark Knight did exceptionaly well in everything and looked good while doing it, and we feel that ASUS went above and beyond with this card.