ASUS EN9800GX2 review - first look at 9800 GX2

Page 2 - 9800 GX2 technical specification

Although this is a different type of card, you'll be disappointed if a technical superiority compared to other NVIDIA models is what you've expected from GeForce 9800 GX2. The card uses a variation of the same G92 core, as in 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512. As we already stated, the only reason these two cards are not a part of 9-th NVIDIA series is that the company didn't want to diminish sales of the available 8800 GTS 320/640MB, 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra (not that this didn't happen anyway).

To be more precise, each of the graphic chips of the GeForce 9800 GX2 has 8 clusters of 16 scalar processors or 2x128 = 256 "shaders" combined. Each core is working at 600MHz (referent), while the scalar processors work at 1500MHz. The memory is GDDR3 and is working at 2000MHz. Each of the graphic chips is manufactured by the 65nm process and has 754 million transistors or 1.508 billion in whole! Nothing illogical or unseen - NVIDIA just bet's on brute power in order to keep it's crown. We don't intent to show the G92 architecture in detail (but if you're looking for detailed technical description look at our first 8800 GT & 8800 GTS review, but we will bring up some of the more important chip characteristics, just to be clear as to how the card works.

Distinctive for the G92, the core has 4 cluster of 4 rasterizing processors (32 processors in group of 8 clusters). Each block communicates with the memory through 64bit bus, so each core gets 4x64bit or 256bit memory bus as whole. Each core has 512MB of memory or combined in SLI - 1GB, via a 512bit (combined again) bus. Between the two cores is BR04-300, 48-pass PCI-E 2.0 chip, which communicates with each card with a maximum of 16x, and that is the same speed that is used between it and the motherboard PCI-E slot. The chip is designed by NVIDIA. In the end the card's characteristics are impressive even as a mere combination of two cores on one slot.

Last but not least we'll mention the added option for CPU Broadcast, which is actually a technology of the SLI bridge, not of the cores. The technology that uses that is called "HybridPower". It allows if the card is on a motherboard that has an integrated one, to transfer all operations to the integrated one, when there is no heavy load, thus saving a great amount of power (not to mention becoming utterly quiet). Now let's head to the real review and take a closer look upon ASUS EN9800GX2 1GB.