As the holidays loom near, we are sure many of you are itching to add some hot new hardware to your wish lists. Whether you are just looking to upgrade or are seeking that perfect piece of hardware for a friend or loved one, finding the right match can be daunting. Well further complicating matters is the recent severe economic downturn which is affecting us all. While the weak economy has an effect on consumer purchasing power, it also opens the doors for drastic price cuts as competition increases and inventories sit, collecting dust. No doubt, as the end of the month approaches, there will certainly be some attractive deals to be had which is always the case during the holiday season. - HotHardware

ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix Custom Card Review

Since our focus today is on affordable graphics cards, one item on our radar that seems to be an interesting mid-range solution is the ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix edition. The ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix is an excellent candidate for those looking for solid desktop graphics without an excessive price tag. For a reasonable price point of around $150, the ASUS GeForce 9800 GT card aims to deliver a wealth of features and strong performance, without taking a huge bite out of your holiday budget. The ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix comes with a good collection of essentials in its retail package, but doesn't offer any extras.

Essentially a revamed GeForce 8800 GT, the ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix is built around the the 55nm G92 chipset. Their engine is clocked at 612MHz, which is just 12MHz over reference specifications, while the shader clock runs at 1512MHz. Unlike the slightly overclocked GPU, the unit's 512MB of GDDR3 comes clocked at 1800MHz, following the reference specifications. As for its cooling, ASUS designed a custom solution that performs much better then the stock reference design. ASUS claims this hybrid Matrix cooler is very quiet, and we couldn't agree more. Even playing 3D games, the noise output was very low.

With its slight factory overclock and custom cooler, we were not certain what to expect when ramping up the clock speeds with the ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix. Loading NVIDIA's nTune software, so we raised the GPU and memory speeds as high as they would go while still being able to complete the GPU stress testing. Our efforts proved fruitful, squeezing out an additional 78MHz of GPU speed and uncovering an additional 300MHz of memory speed. These gains allowed the Extreme N9800 GT to nearly match the results of the GeForce 8800 GTX, however was not able to eclipse the performance of the ATI Radeon 4850.

While our test results may show evidence that the Radeon HD 4850 is the better performing card overall, it isn't just that simple of a determination. While these Radeon HD 4850's can be found for $150, they are often stock models with no bells and whistles added. If you seek out a factory overclocked model with a custom cooler, the price tends to move closer to the $170-190 range. In our opinion, the ASUS Exyreme N9800 GT Matrix edition proved to be a decent choice for $150, offering ultra quiet performance, HDMI, PhysX and CUDA support, and competitive performance in all of the tests we threw at it.

While we were pleased with the ASUS Extreme N9800 GT Matrix overall, there is a lot of competition in this area and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 proved to be a better performer in the majority of tests. However, when you start looking at cards with HDMI ports, the Radeon HD 4850 tends to increase in price by $30-40. We think you couldn't go wrong with either model at their respective price points, but if money is an issue, considering its features and performance, we currently think ASUS has done a good job with the Extreme N9800 GT Matrix version and is surely worth the money.