The recent announcement of graphics cards based on Nvidia’s new GT200 chip is surely the most momentous event in the PC hardware field since the beginning of 2008. The new flagship card will be pitted against its opponents on our website soon – we’ve received a sample of the GeForce GTX 280 just a few days ago.
Today, we are offering you a review and test results of a GeForce 9800 GTX card based on the G92 chip. With the GT200 coming up, we will try to pinpoint the place of the GeForce 9800 GTX in Nvidia’s line-up of single-chip solutions and see if it is proper for this card to be in Nvidia’s line-up at all from a common user’s and overclocker’s viewpoints.
Closer Look at Chaintech GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB (GAE98GTX)
Package and Accessories
The box with the graphics card from Walton Chaintech is huge. It has a large glossy cardboard cover, a sunlit sexy futuristic brunette gracing the front panel.
The text and labels on the box indicate the card’s support of Nvidia PureVideo HD and SLI technologies and tell you the memory type and memory bus width. The amount of memory is indicated wrongly. It is not 1 gigabyte because all GeForce 9800 GTX come with 512 megabytes of memory. If you take a closer look, you can note that the “GTX” part of the product name is just glued to the box. There must be “GX2” under it. Coupled with the wrong indication of the memory amount, it means the box was originally designed for GeForce 9800 GX2 series cards but was later adapted more or less successfully for GeForce 9800 GTX.
Inside the colorful cover there is a main box made from thick cardboard. Its compartments contain the graphics card and accessories. The accessories are rather scanty:
- One adapter from 15-pin DVI to D-Sub connector
- S-Video cable
- CD with drivers
- Adapter for component video output
While you can get along without free games on DVDs, you may want a cable for connecting additional power to the card especially as the GeForce 9800 GTX needs not one but two such cables.
