EVGA Corp., a leading supplier of various graphics cards and mainboards, on Wednesday became the world’s first company to offer pre-overclocked versions of Nvidia’s flagship GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card powered by two graphics processing units (GPU). The new graphics cards allow EVGA to become the supplier of the world’s fastest non-custom graphics boards.

All Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards are presently produced by a contract manufacturer under close supervision of Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest developer of graphics processors. The chip designer sells its add-in-card partners already made GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards, leaving very little space for further performance increases or customization. Moreover, in case of the current flagship Nvidia forbid its partners to alter clock-speeds, making it very hard for companies to differentiate themselves.

Nevertheless, EVGA managed to persuade Nvidia to allow it to sell pre-overclocked graphics cards that sometimes offer considerably higher performance than reference design products. As a result, EVGA is currently the only graphics cards vendor that offers five different GeForce 9800 GX2 models with different clock-speeds, one of which – the BlackPerl edition – is even equipped with liquid-cooling solutions.

The lineup of EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB graphics cards looks as follows:

• EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB: GPU frequency: 600MHz, unified shader processors frequency: 1500MHz, memory frequency: 2000MHz, model: 01G-P3-N891-AR, price: $599.
• EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB SC (SuperClocked): GPU frequency: 625MHz, unified shader processors frequency: 1562MHz, memory frequency: 2000MHz, model: 01G-P3-E892-AR, price: $599.
• EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB KO (Knock-Out): GPU frequency: 650MHz, unified shader processors frequency: 1620MHz, memory frequency: 2050MHz, model: 01G-P3-E895-AR, price: $609.
• EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB SSC (SuperSuperClocked): GPU frequency: 675MHz, unified shader processors frequency: 1674MHz, memory frequency: 2100MHz, model: 01G-P3-E897-AR, price: $619.
• EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB BlackPearl: GPU frequency: 675MHz, unified shader processors frequency: 1674MHz, memory frequency: 2100MHz, model: 01G-P3-E897-WR, price: unknown.

It is interesting to note that substantially pre-overclocked e-GeForce 9800 GX2 SSC edition costs just $20 higher compared to the graphics card with default clock-speeds, which may indicate a very special relationship between EVGA and Nvidia.

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card – the flagship product by Nvidia – is powered by two code-named G92 graphics chips that are also used on numerous GeForce 8800-series graphics cards. The graphics solution sports 256 unified shader processors and 1GB memory in total. Since performance of the model 9800 GX2 relies on driver support for multi-GPU SLI technology for every particular game, actual performance of Nvidia’s flagship offering varies from title to title.

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