Pricing

Unfortunately the Gainward 9800GTX is pretty hard to find currently in the BENELUX region, but considering it is clocked at reference specifications you may well find it priced somewhere in between €260 and €300. The 8800GTS can be found at prices starting from €230 going up to €260+. The mainstream 8800GT can be found as low as €160 but also up to €220 for after market version with factory OC.

Conclusive thoughts

Before we let you go, let us have a look at what we at Madshrimps have been testing lately. Here is performance overview chart:



In all our tests the Gainward 9800GTX came out as fastest, sometimes performing over 10% faster then the 8800GTS 512MB although in some tests both were even. Overall you can say that the new GTX is around 5% faster than the 8800GTS 512Mb. Not the big performance boost we would have hoped for, having a closer look at the card you'll notice that the GTX is in fact nothing else then an 8800GTS on steroids. It uses the same GPU, only clocked few percent higher. Factory overclocked 8800 GTS may perform on par, or sometimes even better and this at lower prices.

On the other hand, while the 8800GTS is still a mainstream product you can clearly see the 9800GTX is all high-end glory. The PCB has few tweaks and improvements, faster memory, better power distribution, and probably the most important off all: Triple SLI support.

The heatsink offers low to acceptable noise ratios and overall there is lots of 'breathing' room left before the GPU will get into the critical temperature regions. The power consumption is just like with the 8800GTS far from great but in return you do get high-end performance, and that's all that counts, right?

All in all the Gainward 9800GTX scores average in performance per dollar/euro, worse than the 8800GTS 512MB and I think we must conclude that the new GTX is not worth its 'GTX' label. It's high-end, but performance wise it does not outperform the mainstream cards by a large enough margin.

What questions us the most is why NVIDIA did not increase the reference clock frequencies further of the 9800GTX. From our overclocking tests we noticed that the G92 yields are excellent and overall there was quite some headroom left for such a high-end product. NVIDIA could have easily added around 7% more performance at launch date, something which would certainly be much appreciated by those looking for a replacement in the high-end market, but as it is right now I'd say that the 9800GTX is only 'interesting' for using Triple SLI… and Tri-SLI is separate discussion topic.


The Gainward Bliss 9800GTX 512MB:

+ High performance
+ Quality heatsink, low GPU temperature and acceptable noise levels
+ Overclocking headroom
+ Triple SLI
+ PC-game Tomb Raider Anniversary
+ Acceptable price-tag if ~€260, can get pricey sometimes though

- Performance/price wise hard to justify over GF8800GTS 512MB



I would like to thank Barbara from Gainward to give us the possibility to test the Gainward 9800GTX 512MB, until next time, cheers!