The verdict
Mmmmmmmh yes, I like it. Granted this card is nothing new in terms of performance, and is surely bound to disappoint the ones that had high hopes and expected a new faster single GPU based flagship product. That's the only real distress we can think of, but yeah we are still at the same performance level as year and a half ago.
Why am I positive about this product then ? For one sole reason only ... the price.
In Guru3D's GeForce 9800 GX2 article I preached that gaming is getting too expensive and in able for the graphics industry to survive the prices need to be addressed. And today is where I have to fall on my knees and have to show our appreciation to NVIDIA for making a really nice move.
Suggested retail prices for the 9800 GTX cards will be $299-349 / 249-300 EUR. And that's just really good. As you guys probably know, I reside in the Netherlands and have called a couple of e-tailers. Quite a few of them expect the price to drop towards 250 EUR in the first month of the release of this product. Now you have to agree with me; that's just a really fair price for this product.
With today's games the GeForce 9800 GTX obviously will eat pretty much anything you throw at it and then shout "dude get me some more!"
Framerates are great which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. Some examples you ask ? Well, Call of Duty 4 at 1920x1200 pushes out an average framerate of 45 FPS, and that's with all eye-candy enabled. Another new title, Frontlines Fuel of war (Actually bundled free with this Point of View card), the game is rendered at 43 FPS again at 1920x1200; with the highest image quality settings set in-game. That's just an awesome gaming experience man. With the card also comes Hybrid SLI functionality, with the to be released Hybrid mainboards (simply put integrated graphics in the mainboard) the 9800 GTX can be switched off when not used. Cool feature. Also cool is HD decoding. In combo with PowerDVD this card will eat High-def content alive, not only that, it improves image quality as well.
Awards time. Point of View includes that game for free, and that's additional value. Also you'll get a three year warranty on the product which is just awesome as well. Price for performance wise you really can't go wrong here either. So yeah, I like the 9800 GTX. With that in mind I'm granting Point of view our "Gaming essential" award. So yes, the GeForce 9800 GTX is a product not very different than the GeForce 8800 GTX. It offers similar performance, but comes optimized, and with improved Purevideo core-logic and at a way better price. That's just awesome.
Thanks go out to POV for their continued support.
When you click here, you can move onwards to another 9800 GTX article .. this time from the guys at BFG where we'll do some sexy SLI moves with their 9800 GTX. It's a love thang man!
Let me end with my world famous one-liner: You are here: X
Bam!
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB
Price - $299-349 / 249-300 EUR already found for $339.99
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