Richard Vanderhurst

EVGA’s Superclocked edition of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at a reasonable cost. You may expect it to play most current Computer games at smooth frame rates, particularly on lower resolutions. We have seen costs as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you’d be smart to research. Otherwise, the differences between these 2 cards, in price, power consumption, and speed are immaterial. In this “Superclocked” design from EVGA, Nvidia’s chip has its core clock speed boosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was meant to be Nvidia’s Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you can see on our charts, even this overclocked model only hardly outperforms its competition.

We ran some rather assertive baselines on these cards, and for the main part they held up well. The exception, as always, is Crysis, on which neither card was in a position to achieve a playable frame refresh rate. Whether or not the Radeon card was quicker on that test than the GeForce, it’s still only hitting 20 frames per second on 1,400×960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x led to refresh rates around 35 fps, but still well below the sixty frames per second hallowed ground. For Far Cry two, you can see the 2 cards are approximately tied on the lower resolutions they favor. On the less tough Left4Dead even the 1,920×1,200 setting poses small challenge.

Otherwise, for the foreseeable future at least, either one of these cards should deliver a smooth, well-detailed gaming experience. If the performance is essentially a wash, we find that each card has an advantage in other areas that might sway your purchasing decision. Though it is a double-wide, overclocked card, the EVGA GeForce GTX 9800+ basically uses less power than the Radeon card with your PC idling. As with almost all 3D cards above $100, each of these cards also need a direct connection to your Computer’s power supply, particularly a single six-pin PCI-Express power input. Ironically, as the Radeon card needs only a single growth slot, it’s better suited to smaller Computers than the GeForce GTX 9800+, though the previous needs more power.

Not every game will distribute its workload uniformly across 2 graphics cards, but with one card that is not a problem. For the sake of stability ( as well as faster installation ) you are typically better off with a single $400 card then 2 $200 cards. With few games that exploit either vendors’ features in a forceful way thus far, neither can claim supremacy with its extras. By including an onboard audio processor, ATI has eliminated that intermediary step.
That and the single slot could be enough to sway home theater fans away from the GeForce card.

GeForce GTX 260 Review

“Core 216″ refers back to the fact that this is the second issue of this chip, with 216 processing cores, compared to 192 in the first. Sadly , potency in 3D cards does not usually translate into speed, and if you spend a little bit more you will find a noticeably quicker graphics card powered by ATI.

We like that card in its price class, but it is actually not the most reasonable product out there, neither is it acceptable for those with smaller monitors. Its frame refresh rates on all but Crysis are playable, so it’s in no fashion incapable, but current relative speeds also supply a guide for which cards might perform well on more demanding titles down the line.

We are especially impressed by its efficiency at load, consuming a full fifty watts less than the GTX 280, which was only a little quicker on our performance charts.

If you are feeling aware of your power invoice and the environment, and do not mind sacrificing some frames per 2nd, this EVGA card may all of a sudden look more engaging. Likely, you would still wish to match this card with at least a 550- or 600-watt power supply, presuming you combine it with a quad-core or fast dual-core CPU. You will not find a budget Computer with such a high wattage PSU, but you could be in a position to sneak it into a lately bought Computer around $1,000 or so. You want to attach the audio to the motherboard audio chip or your Computer sound card to send audio over the HDMI port, however. And, naturally, this card supports Nvidia’s SLI multicard technology, as well as hardware-accelerated PhysX, CUDA-enabled software, and all the other supposed “visual computing” features Nvidia likes to gloat about.

Some parallel computing features, like the agnostic zooming features in Adobe’s Photoshop CS four, are helpful, but we haven’t begun to see any gaming or widespread software implementation to persuade us of GPU-based computing’s main line use. We believe it’s only a matter of time, but by that point you will likely have a completely new array of 3D cards to choose between.