Dreams of playing your favorite video games as large as life and silky smooth abound. Wouldn't it be great if we could all afford one of these monster graphics cards? Today we will take a close look at what we will call a junior monster. Currently fourth in NVIDIA's lineup of single GPU cards, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a card for the mainstream gamer and offers refinements on an already proven design, specifically the wildly popular and powerful G92 core. With a die shrink to 55nm speeds are up and temps are down. We will focus specifically on the Palit non reference design. With it's nearly silent cooler and slightly overclocked core this card should put up some good performance numbers. - Benchmark Reviews

Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ Custom Board Style Review

The Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ arrived in a fairly large FedEx box. We assumed it must have alot of padding inside to protect the actual product box. We were wrong, as it was all product box. The box was massive. The box is bigger than most average mainboard boxes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it offers plenty of protection but it seems to use a lot of extra material that is not needed. In this day and age when the buzz word is green this box seems excessive. Don't get us wrong it's very well done with high quality print clearly stating what's inside and with a brief technical description on the rear of the box in 12 languages.

The heart of the beast is yet another G92 core. Reference speeds are up from the GeForce 9800 GTX but other than a small factory overclock the specs are the same as any other GeForce 9800 GTX+ version. These numbers on the core do indeed checkout to indicate a 55nm core. At least in this case the smaller die does equate to lower temps and allows higher frequency over their standard GeForce 9800 GTX card. The Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ uses the same memory as most other GTX+ boards do, very fast Samsung memory rated as 0.8ns and good for 2400MHz, so it seems this memory is currently running under specs.

The board itself adds a bit of a system shock. When you know you are looking at a GeForce card but everything about it says it's from the other team it messes with you a little bit. The heatsink is very sturdy and adds a bit of aftermarket look to the card and heatpipes are always cool to see sticking out the side. This is definitely one unique GeForce 9800 GTX+ board. The Palit GeForce 9800 GTX+ functions just as it is described. Not once did it have even the slightest hickup or issue. Currently the Palit version is available at Newegg for $190 and the value is on par price wise with any other GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics cards.

We're left with a solid performing mainstream level graphics card and one glaring question still on our minds. Why go to the trouble to design a whole new PCB, heatsink and fan when in the end it's just another GeForce 9800 GTX+ card? It's nearly identical to the specs and performance of any other GTX+ and it's the same price. Couldn't they have done a redesign on just a cooler? Don't get us wrong, we like the card as it performs flawlessly just as it should, but it doesn't appear to stand out from the crowd.