With so many graphics cards available on the market as we see today, how do you know which one to choose? Your answer should be based upon three basic things, the first on being how much gaming power you need, what can you afford and lastly what about the compatibility with your machine? Gigabyte has taken these problems into account, and introduces to us the Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GT Zalman powered graphics card. That means it is not like the standard design set by NVIDIA, but that Gigabyte id go a different route with this one. Now some of its highlights include a Zalman cooler, DirectX 10 support, and just an all solid capacitor design, but how can it handle today's hottest games? - TechwareLabs

Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GT Zalman Cool Style Review

The Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GT came neatly packaged in white and blue box with features strewn about the front. Gigabyte makes sure you know that their 512MB strong card comes with a Zalman fan and is overclockable up to 700MHz. The box is clever, and would draw the usual consumer to read it, especially with the girl and the gun on it. After opening the box, we are greeted with a tightly packed graphics card, and many adapters. We must say that Gigabyte took the consumer into account when packaging the card. They are very careful to ensure the card does not get damaged in shipping, and has every adapter included.

The Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GT has many interesting aspects about the card, including the color of the card's PCB. It seems to be somewhat of a teal color, and contrasts the goldish bronze Zalman fan strangely, but nicely. Gigabyte is well known for having interesting color schemes like these, and this color scheme definitely carries into their GeForce 9 series cards. The Zalman fan is fairly un-obtrusive, and fits decently on the PCB. Because of the thick nature of the Zalman fan, this causes the card to take up two slots. We are sure a low clearance water block would allow you to stack the cards in a single slot though.

The Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GT card has a handle on just about every game and canned benchmark out there. While we tested the default Zalman model, the overclocked model is priced around $129 from Newegg. It is quite reasonable to use this card for a vast array of games. We would have liked to see a bit better results out of Crysis and Crysis Warhead, but that's the price you pay for an older generation card. Due to the incredible price for a product with results such as this, we can recommend it highly.