Nvidia 9800GX2

The graphics card market is getting heated up now. Nvidia is coming up with a new card every few weeks. The 8800 Ultra had been reining the graphics card market for quite some time now. To change it all, comes a new contender (or champion should I say), the 9800GX2. It is basically two 8800GT s bridged together and mind you, this is not any other card, it is a monster! With a gig of 512-Bit memory, this card eats every benchmark for breakfast.

PERFORMANCE
Benchmarks show that this card can take on two 8800 GTX in SLi! It shows blistering frame rates with all the eye candy cranked up in most of the games. It completely knocks out all the cards out there. You won’t like to waste such insane amount of power for running games at 1024x768 resolution, so you can pretty much ignore those benchmarks. It scores 12992 points in 3dmark 06 which is lower than 8800Ultra and HD3870X2 but the real world tests are more reliable than synthetic tests.

POWER CONSUMPTION
The power consumed by this card is good. The idle consumption was around 165 watts (The 8800 ultra consumes 160W). Under stress, the consumption jumps to around 375 W which 10W more than 8800 Ultra. So, the performance is doubled and consumption is the same! This is due to the 65nm fabrication process.

VERDICT
It is too early to say now. Buy this card only if you have money to throw. Moreover, this card cannot run Crysis in its full glory. To do that, you have to get two of these cards, a fast processor and a large hole in your pocket.