ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

In the Cool Zone

Zotac is a relatively new brand in the graphics card market, though it has an experienced manufacturer behind it. And so far, it has impressed us with its offerings. Apart from the standard reference based cards, it also has two other product lines that features its own customized cards. They are the AMP! and ZONE editions. The difference between the two is rather straightforward. Cards from the AMP! edition comes factory-overclocked, whereas those from the ZONE edition feature silent cooling solutions.

That said, the Zotac GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB ZONE Edition is the current flagship of the ZONE edition of cards. Its unique selling point is that it is water-cooled. However, since this is the very first GeForce 9800 GTX+ card that we are reviewing and NVIDIA has so many rather confusing GPU names, let us first talk you through a little about this relatively 'new' GPU.

You know this is one massive card when you see the box that houses it. At nearly half a meter tall, it is probably one of the biggest package for a graphics card we've ever seen.

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ was launched not too long ago in July and is once again a refresh, this time of the 9800 GTX. It differs from the latter in that it is manufactured using a 55nm process, a first for NVIDIA. It also has higher clock speeds, 738MHz for the core, 2200MHz memory and 1836MHz for the shaders, as opposed to the 9800 GTX's core, memory and shader clock speeds of 675MHz, 2200MHz and 1688MHz respectively. Basically, it was conceived by NVIDIA as a quick-fix so as to provide the Radeon HD 4850 from ATI some competition in the lucrative mid to high-end market.

GPU-Z gets it wrong here. It is a 55nm core not a 65nm.

Although the screenshot from GPU-Z indicates that our card was manufactured using a 65nm process, instead of a 55nm one, we decided to open the card up to make sure. Checking the code found on the core (G92-420-B1), we confirmed that it was indeed a 55nm core and not 65nm as reported on GPU-Z. Now let's take a look at how it stacks up against comparative cards.

We checked the core code G92-420-B1 and found that it was indeed a 55nm core, and not 65nm as GPU-Z reported. The B1 in the code indicates that it is 55nm.

Zotac GeForce 9800 GTX+ ZONE Edition and competitive comparison cards

Model	NVIDIA9800GTX+ 512MB	NVIDIAGeForce 9800GTX 512MB	NVIDIAGeForce 8800 GTS 512MB	ATIRadeon HD 4850 512MB	ATIRadeon HD 3870 X2 1GB
CoreCode	G92	G92	G92	RV770	R680(RV670 x 2)
TransistorCount	754million	754million	754million	965million	1332million
ManufacturingProcess	55nm	65nm	65nm	55nm	55nm
CoreClock	740MHz	675MHz	650MHz	625MHz	825MHz
StreamProcessors	128Stream Processors	128Stream Processors	128Stream Processors	160Processors (800 Stream Processing Units)	128Processors (640 Stream Processing Units)
StreamProcessor Clock	1836MHz	1688MHz	1625MHz	625MHz	825MHz
TextureMapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF)units	64	64	64	40	32
RasterOperator units (ROP)	24	24	24	16	32
MemoryClock	2200MHzGDDR3	2200MHzGDDR3	1940MHzGDDR3	2000MHzGDDR3	1800MHzGDDR3
DDRMemory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
MemoryBandwidth	70.4GB/s	70.4GB/s	62.0GB/s	64.0GB/s	115.2GB/s
PCIExpress Interface	PCIever 2.0 x 16	PCIever 2.0 x 16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16
MolexPower Connectors	2 x6-pin	2 x6-pin	1 x 6-pin	1 x6-pin	6-pin,8-pin
CMultiGPU Technology	SLI	SLI	SLI	CrossFireX	CrossFireX
DVIOutput Support	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 Dual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link
HDCPOutput Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
StreetPrice	~US$199	~US$170	~US$170	~US$199	~US$220



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