ATi, at the moment, has phenomenal assortment from month to month, covering all “wholes” on the market, while “green ones” as reply give only new names for the same product over and over again. Of course, that attitude certainly cannot lead to success and appearance of sometime advantage over the Canadians has evaporated up to measure that all strings in large are now in ATi’s hands. This month doesn’t differ from one before: ATi introduced completely new product and nVIDIA offers new name for old graphics card – GeForce 9800GT. These business decisions  had for nVIDIA negative consequences reflected as dissatisfied business partners and once nVIDIA’s  exclusive partners saw the mistakes and started with production of ATi’s models (Gainward for example).


Asus EN9800GT 512MB Matrix

Even if we did hope that nVIDIA with this card will introduce at least the minimal changes in manufacturing process, we were once more disappointed after official announcement that this graphics card will be based on G92 chip made in 65nm process. So, nothing didn’t change, which means that GeForce 9800GT is completely identical with model that brought so much new, exactly one year ago and it was awarded in every IT media: the very popular GeForce 8800GT. The one slightest difference is possibility for Triple-SLI connection although the practical value of that possibility is minor. Still, when you have good hardware product that survived on market one year and when it comes time for you to introduce your next “best shot” if you instead of that just “wipe off the dust” from old product and give it a new name, you can be certain that you won’t get for the second time tap on the shoulder that says “Bravo!” As addition to that, competition didn’t look at its laurels, so natural response is lack of positive critics for nVIDIA products. 9800GTX at least brought something new, minimal but something, while 9800GT is without any improvement. By this, we mean on characteristics for these two graphics card: G92 GPU with 112 stream processors set at 600MHz. Texture and ROP units are, logically, left unchanged which is 56 and 16 respectively. Even situation with memory didn’t change a bit and therefore 9800GT has 256-bit bus with 512MB DDR3 memory set at 1800MHz. So, some major differences in test results comparing to GeForce 8800GT shouldn’t be expected, differences will be bigger as much as drivers advanced from year 2007.

Since we didn’t have reference graphics card on this test, we used Asus Republic of Gamers model. This ROG comes in well designed package with basic bundle consisted of discs with drivers and manual, S-Video cable, molex adapter and VGA-DVI converter. Card has top design and quality built and it doesn’t use referent PCB or cooling system. Black PCB with excellent cooling solution makes this graphics card very visually attractive. Cooling profile is made of aluminum with two heat pipes that go through it and in combination with “blower” type fan whole system is very efficient. During tests, this graphics card was very silent and additional reason for that is the fact that Asus didn’t change default clocks even though the cooling system can support higher temperatures. Clocks are: 600MHz for GPU and 1800MHz for memory. We must praise Asus for excellent choice made with outputs: S-Video, HDMI, DVI and optical SPDIF (!) which is great and the fact is that ASUS extracted maximum out of 9800GT in multimedia sense. On top edge of PCB, you will find also two SLI connectors. Power consumption didn’t change, comparing it to GeForce 8800GT which means that maximum power that this card can consume is reasonable 105W so this is the reason why Asus EN9800GT has one 6-pin power connector.