XFX 9800GX2

NVIDIA drops a new generation into the market but is it any good? Josh Collins finds out.

We’ve been joking over the past couple months about ‘another month, another NVIDIA release’ and, true to form the green corner has let another card out to play.

What’s different this time around is that the new player in the graphics race marks the introduction of the new high-end product for the 9-series generation, as well as NVIDIA’s first dual GPU core/single card solution. We saw the ‘next-gen’ series make its debut in the form of the 9600GT last month, and we were suitably impressed by that budget offering. Now it’s time for the big boys to come out to play and we’ve been waiting some time now for this arrival.

First though, you need to know some background on this new beast, the 9800GX2. To get the ball rolling, the 9800GX2 uses two G92-based cores; these are the same series of cores that made an appearance in the 8800GTS 512MB. As such, and rather unsurprisingly, this means each core sports 128 stream processors per core and 512MB of GDDR3 memory dedicated per core. Paired with this is a 256-bit memory interface, dedicated per core memory allocation. As a grand total, we have two G92 cores, a sum of 256 stream processors and 1024MB (1GB) of memory running over a split memory interface with each ‘lane’ operating at 256-bit.

A bit of a mess if you ask us and to keep things simple, it can be summed up with one very simple phrase; “it’s like two 8800GTS 512MB thrown together to make a GPU sandwich that’s running in SLI”.

So, if we ‘compare the pair’, as those annoying superannuation TV ads like to say, we’d come up with something along the lines of the table below – oh, and to spice things up we threw in a pair of overclocked 8800GTX in SLI, too.

Here we can begin to see similarities, particularly between the 9800GX2 and two 8800GTS 512MB in SLI. It can be seen that the 9800GX2 uses the same core, the G92, and therefore also has the same amount of stream processors, memory capacity, memory interface bit size etc. It’s interesting to note the drop in core and shader frequencies; this is presumably due to the thermal restrictions of having a single heatsink sandwiched between two cores and trying to effectively cool both.

The XFX-branded model has a premium price point, while the cheapest in the market goes for about $100 less and runs the same reference design clock speeds. The card is bundled with a full version of Company of Heroes, though we’re still wondering what the extra $100 gets you. Perhaps this is the price of branding, or maybe the surcharge for the box artwork, which is reminiscent of work by world renowned German graffiti artist, Seak (www.seakone.com).

When looking at the numbers produced by our benchmarks, we couldn’t help but feel an urge to buy two 8800GTS 512MB rather than a single 9800GX2 – the only requirement of course being an SLI compatible motherboard. This is one area where the 9800GX2 does gain at least something. With no motherboard specific requirements, other than the PCI express slot it sits in, the 9800GX2 offers performance akin to that of an SLI system without requiring an expensive SLI motherboard.

If you’ve already got an 8800GTS 512MB card and an SLI compatible motherboard and you’re looking for a boost, we suggest a second card over purchasing a single 9800GX2 – get two and that’s a different story, though, both for your 3D experience and your wallet!

To round this all up, this card really feels like what would be more appropriately named an 8800GX2 or 8900GX2, if only the marketing mob didn’t wish to push out a new series of cards blazoned with a preceding 9 – the 7900 series worked fine, why not an 8900 series? Because we’re certainly not seeing a generational leap in performance.