Introduction



A while ago, NVIDIA released its newest Geforce series, GeForce 9. The first card on the market was the 9600 GT, which we've already pushed over its limits here. Now it's time for the higher end, 9800 GTX, which is still affordable as these samples can already be found at €250. It's a single GPU solution, in contrary to the 9800GX2, so cooling down the card with LN² should be quite easy when you find the right container to place on the card;

Let's see if these cards are really suited for extreme overclocking.

Test setup and methodology

Blind's 9800GTX Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core2Duo E8500
Cooling	Stock XFX 9800GTX air cooling K|ngp|n's Dragon F1 EE K|ngp|n's Tek9 3.0
Mainboard	Abit IP35 Pro
Memory	2 * 1GB OCZ Reaper PC9200
Other	XFX 9800GTX OCZ Proxstream 1KW Windows XP SP3

The benchmarks we chose to run were those of the HWBot benchmark suite to help our Overclocking Team with more point and higher ranking!

3DMark01

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

Aquamark3

Detailed information regarding the setup/cooling

We compared the results of three different setups:

9800 GTX at standard speeds

High stable speeds when overclocked with the reference cooler

Custom container mounted on the video card, maximum overclock

In both air cooled test conditions, we clocked the cpu to 4,4GHz to lower the bottleneck and have a better view on the performance gain of overclocking the card. Why only 4,4GHz? Well, at the moment of testing, Belgium is the hottest country of Europe with 28-30°C, which is not that good when overclocking.

In the LN² test session, we overclocked both CPU and VGA to the limits, so clock frequencies used in the various benchmarks differ a bit.

When we started overclocking the 9800 GTX while cooled with LN² a coldbug kicked in. The coldbug has been in the overclocking world for quite some time now and it basically means that the hardware shuts down when a critical temperature is reached. With the 9800GTX, this critical temperature lies at -45°C, if you below this limit the video card refuses to work. Luckily, the nVidia engineers are trying to fix the coldbug by updating the bios, so an update in the future on our results is quite possible.



In the photo above we can see that at -50°C the card shuts down and the voltage delivered the GPU by the system drops. Onto our OC results ->