If you’re looking for a revolutionary piece of hardware you’ve come to the wrong place – where the 9800GTX shines is the performance per dollar and definitely not in its misuse of a 9xxx-series moniker. This makes me wonder why NVIDIA bothered at all calling this current generation of cards a 9xxx-series when the chief difference is a die-shrink.

This GTX card really has a dumb moniker in that the former 8800GTX implied that it was the top-dog of the class when the fact is, that this card is exactly the same GPU with the same memory interface (256-bit) and RAM payload (512MB) as the 8800GTS 512. It still has 128 stream processors; however, the clock rates have been updated to reflect its current price of between $300-$350.

NVIDIA has set the clock rate to 675MHz for the GPU and 2200MHz for memory clocks – as you’ll see in this review, both ASUS and XFX (for now) have kept those settings in each of their initial respective offerings.

In a way, NVIDIA has rolled the dice in hopes that this card would perform very well for its price while not directly competing against its own 8800GT and 9800GX2. This puts it squarely between an AMD 3870X2 and 8800GTS 512 in both price and (as you’ll see), performance.

There’s no doubt that AMD has done a great job of bouncing back these past couple of months and I think it’s really forced NVIDIA’s hand a bit in the sense that it’s releasing new GPUs with purely marketing-driven naming schemes which really offer nothing new except good performance for the dollar. Then again, that’s what competition is all about – as long as we end up with faster, cheaper cards, I’m all for it.

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