ASUS EN9800GX2 review - first look at 9800 GX2

NVIDIA's second attempt at dual core cards is at hand. It's named GeForce 9800GX2 and here in the ModReactor laboratory it's tome to check how well they did this time, considering their failure of a first attempt at it with the GeForce 795O GX2 an the recent AMD flop in the form of HD3870X2.

The past 2007 was intense as far as videocard presentations are concerned, high performance card that is. Should we look in retrospection on the past decade - we would find ourselves a bit scared, to find out where things are headed. The industry of video games had reached apogee, the game developers never cease to push to new graphical heights, (to some extent being pushed themselves by the videocard manufacturers). With the 5-th NVIDIA videocard series and respectively the Radeon 9xxx from ATI, the cards began to cost insane amounts of money, and ever since NVIDIA's 6-th series there is another way to get the users money - SLI. Nowadays things are even more serious, high class hardware is even more pricey and newer products are being pushed out... constantly. After the release of XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3, more and more game developers are focusing the main efforts in console games (the reasons for that include the piracy and the amount of trouble involved in optimizing the software for the vast variety of PC hardware). So with the situation being as it is, the future does look gloom.

Although it's unlikely that the bar would be raised soon as far as graphics go (Crysis... duh!), still at the end of 2007 NVIDIA and AMD pushed a few cards out with the perfect price/performance ratio, after all it just defies logic if all stops here, even for a while. After 8800GT/GTS 512 and HD3870 / HD3850, AMD in an attempt to wrestle with NVIDIA in the high class, got out HD3870X2 - the first dual core videocard in a while, highly unsuccessful due to major Catalyst driver problems, that are persisting even now - over a month after the release of HD3870X2 to the market. That gave NVIDIA an idea, the company was seeking a way to dethrone it's old king (8800 GTX) anyway, after all the card rules ever since the end of 2006та.

And that got us the GeForce 9800 GX2. That's not NVIDIA's first attempt at dual core cards, some of you probably remember the OEM GeForce 7900GX2 and it's later Retail-friendly version - GeForce 7950 GX2. the card was unsuccessful, again due to major dependency upon optimized driver (just like any solution that includes the use of technologies such as SLI or CrossFire). But a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, and the company had been working hard to improve the SLI benefits.

And so here they are - the GeForce 9800GX2 technical specifications, as recommended from NVIDIA.

Once cleared how things look on paper, let's see what really does the card looks like, technically speaking.