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.

ATi Radeon 3870X2

The year 2007 was a real nightmare for ATi. There cards were slaughtered by their Nvidia counterparts. This year, ATi is making an attempt to better it. Their first attempts this year were HD3850 and HD3870. These cards offered enormous value for money as they performed nearly as good as HD2900XT at half the price and less power consumption. This was mainly due to the 55nm fabrication process. Now, ATi is moving on to the high end category with the launch of HD3870X2 which is basically two HD3870s bridged together on a single PCB much like Nvidia's now ancient 7850GX2. With a massive 1332 million transistors and 640 steam processing units, the X2 is expected to give stiff competition to Nvidia's high end cards.

PEFORMANCE
The card shows pretty decent performance in Crysis at 1024x768 resolution. The 8800GTS 512 MB beats it by a good 9FPS. But as the resolution is scaled up to 2560x1600, it is a shade faster than 8800 Ultra. In Call of Duty 4, at the lower resolutions, the card is a shade better than 8800 Ultra. Scaling up the resolution brings the two cards neck to neck.

VERDICT
The only thing I say about this card is that buy this card only if you have a very large monitor supporting resolutions upto 2560x1600 or if you are an ATi fan(this seems to be the only reason to buy Ati cards nowadays).