NVIDIA have recently decided to rename a lot of their GeForce 9 series cards with the GT1 series moniker. Fortunately, XFX sent us over a couple before this, so today we are not testing a GT something or others, it's a GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition. In fact the Black series from XFX are their new special versions which should bring just that extra boost over any other brand which also have some factory overclocked lineup. You may always ask, why going black when there are so much other colors available? Well it seems that a full black design is currently the trend and so you better be jumping on the wagon as long as it is still running. And so did XFX with their special Black series. - XSReviews

XFX GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black 512MB Edition Review

The box for the GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition is pretty epic looking. It has a space like background with some kind of exploding, black hole, big bang thing going on in the background. There's a few feature badges and a little Far Cry 2 logo letting you know you get a free copy with the card. The back of the box has a couple of game pictures in an attempt to show what can be done in games these days. No word that these graphics can be achieved with the card you just bought though. There's also a feature list and some prose on how great NVIDIA are. The bundle included is just standard these days and nothing special.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black is a reasonably good looking card. As per usual it's dominated by the large plastic shroud that covers it. Due to this size, it's quite surprising how light it is. Compare this bad boy to it's ATI equivalent and you'll be very surprised. The shroud's big centre piece is the coaxial black fan situated at the front end of the card. It's got a small XFX logo in it's centre, but other than that it's pretty unremarkable. The rest of the shroud has some Black edition text, to let everyone know you're GeForce 9800 GTX+ is special. This is also a dual slot card, so make sure you have space for this if you buy it.

Before taking part in the testing, we used nTune performance settings within the NVIDIA control panel to goose the card up a bit and see how far it would clock. From a stock speed of 785MHz on the core, and 2300MHz on the memory, we managed to clock it to 827MHz on the core and 2450MHz on the memory. Not a bad overclock really, but nothing that great. Noise wise, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black edition isn't bad either. It runs very quietly when at idle, and even when it's cranked up to full speed it's not too bad. The GeForce 9800 GTX+ Black is a pretty impressive card for the rather modest fee of $199.

On some of these tests, it pulls level with the Radeon HD 4870 and beats it a couple of times on certain settings, which is excellent for a card that costs around half of what the Radeon HD 4870 does. It's not the best looking card around but it's okay and pretty quiet. While it doesn't stand out as anything ground breaking, it definitely ticks most of the boxes. Hell, you get a copy of Far Cry 2 as well. If you are looking for a graphics card around the $199 range, this might just be the one for you.