My 9800gtx arrived today

[Pob255]

As the title says, my new 9800gtx arrived today.
Leadtek one from scan got when it was on today only for £112
Was supposed to be delivered yesterday as I'm off for dental work today so might not of been in, luckly the man from citylink turned up at 9am so I was in.
I'm currently downloading drivers and stuff, I'll report back later when I can with bench marks and such.

I'm a happy bunny

[Fraz]

Nice!

What are your impressions of Leadtek by the way? I want to buy a GTX260 from Scan, and the cheapest one is a Leadtek. Do they have good support, etc, if things go wrong? If not, then i might get a BFG Tech one instead... although that is £20 more expensive.

[shadowcreaper]

tbh based on what i found on forums, it doesnt matter which manufacturers you buy from sinse scan will be the main people you deal with, and sinse trading standards says that it isnt the manufacturers you deal with but the company who sold you the item i dout BFG or any manufacture will matter.

end of the day, scan the people who you will have to deal with if any thing goes wrong, so check THEIR warrenty, manufacturers will only be ur last result if scan do not help you enough .

[Pob255]

Scan and other retailers cover the 1st year after that it's the manufacture.
Although a lot depends on who and what.
e.g. I've had so cheap sweex mice die in the first month and misco (who supplied them) just sent us out some replacements no questions asked.
Also had an HP laptop who's power brick was doa, misco told me to talk to hp, who did a next day swapout.

While I've owned a Leadtec before I never had any fault with it so no idea on after service, but I loved the card, a geforce 6800LE AGP they never bother to make a seperate cooler for the LE so just slapped the humungus lump of copper that was the 6800GT cooler on it

Although most of the high end nvidia cards esp the newest ones are just stock design so the only real differnce will be the sticker on it.

[kalniel]

I've been a fan of leadtek cards for ages

To be honest most of the TW manufacturers are similar - they do usually provide quite good support though response time and helpfulness varies greatly - but it seems to even from the same company *shrugs*. As a package though I think leadtek are nice.

[Pob255]

Inital reaction, it's a giant card compaired to my 7900gs, nearly twice as long.

I went to download the latest XP drivers from the nvidia web site (175.19) and noticed they work for 7series as well as 9series.
So while I was waiting I had had a look at the driver cd that came with the card, it's got some pritty screens for each section of the menu.
On it are 3 sets of xp 32bit drivers, 169.21, 173.67, 174.40
I clicked on the driver install option to see the pritty screen and an extra window poped up telling me "no leadtek card deteted"
I'll admit I hadn't updated my drivers in a while (I think I was on 17something.something) so I thought what the heck, and it said it installed the drivers and asked me to reboot. I also installed it's WinFox2 utility (standard graphics setting and suff, manual says you can also monitor temps, tweek speeds, auto update drivers and flash crad BIOS)
I did only to find I now have no video drivers so I removed the "winfast" drivers (only 5mb that's not right ) and installed the 175.19
Works with my old 7900gs, winfox detects it as a leadtek 7900 (it's an XFX xxx oc card)
however there's no temp or speed settings on it. all it lets me do is set resolution and colour like the nvidia drivers do and supply links to graphics and computer properties, like I can do with right click of the mouse.
Now downloading nTune so I can check it's at the correct settings.

My guess here is that the Leadtek drivers on the cd are tweeked non-standard ones, I'll run some bench marks on the 7900gs then swap for the 9800gtx and stick with 175.19 for now and ditch WinFox.

[Pob255]

Ok my bench marks are run now (could be more and better but it's all I've got atm)

Both run on Driver 175.19, quality performance setting, AA set to supersample + nTune monitor open, firefox open (one tab= Hexus forum)
(one note here they both use the same driver so I tried just swaping the card without touching the drivers, windows took ages to detect the 9800gtx but drivers wouldn't load correctly so I had to reinstall them, it was worth a try)

XFX 7900gs xxx (600mhz core, 800mhz memory) + gigabyte cooler (fan set to 60% on my fan controller)
Idel= 45c, slient (well I cannot here it over my other fans)
ATi tool= 0.26 after 5min, =54c, FPS avg 587
CodeCreatures= (OpenGL) 1280x1024, AAx4, = 66.8fps
Aquamark= 1024x768, AAx0, ASx4, = 130.88fps
3DMark06= 1280x1024, AAx0, Filtering=Optimal, 5636 marks
HardwareOC Prey Benchmark= 1280x1024, AAx4, ASx16, Boost=Enabled, = 50.3fps

Leadtek 9800gtx (675mhz core, 1100mhz memory)
Idel= 60c, slient
ATi tool= 0.26 after 5min, =71c, FPS avg 1051, still slient
CodeCreatures= (OpenGL) 1280x1024, AAx4, = 88.9fps
Aquamark= 1024x768, AAx0, ASx4, = 158.24fps
3DMark06= 1280x1024, AAx0, Filtering=Optimal, 12475 marks
HardwareOC Prey Benchmark= 1280x1024, AAx4, ASx16, Boost=Enabled, = 87.5fps

One thing to note here is that when I first boot up I get a quite whoosh for about 1sec, I then never here the fan again. I checked the nTune monitor and the fan speed never budged off 675rpm, compaired to my 7900gs+cooler the temps were far more linier, idels at 60c start 3d app and it quickly hits 71c and levels out.

Must say I'm pritty happy with it so far, although this is less of a graphics card more of a shelf inside my case

And finally here's a quick pic my old 7900gs with gigabyte cooler and 9800gtx

[kalniel]

And finally here's a quick pic my old 7900gs with gigabyte cooler and 9800gtx

Yowser!

I'm actually mildly concerned about length (don't even think about it SiM) - even in the full ATX case I prefer a bit of breathing room between HDDs and graphics card.

[SiM]

Yowser!

I'm actually mildly concerned about length (don't even think about it SiM) - even in the full ATX case I prefer a bit of breathing room between HDDs and graphics card.

Think about what

It doesn't fit in small cases easily... I had to bend the back of my sonata to get it in... but in a small case it doesn't get very hot anyway... because of the exhaust... mine used to idle at 51C in my sonata... UNLIKE THE 4850!

[Pob255]

Strangely enough same as mine I did some checking of the fan speed.
On idle it sits around 50% 51c, underload it goes to 64% and 71c both are totally slient even when I reduce all my other fans to min.

And the card is about 3cm longer than my motherboard and I had to move my 2 sata cables to lower sockets.

[Pob255]

Update: 177.39 Beta driver which include the new nvidia physx running on the card.

I got these drivers installed without problem, well minor problem relocating them, put 177.39 in the search function and it found nothing I know they were there some ware as I saw them before, spotted the region setting was set to USA changed it to UK and researched, low and behold, vista, xp and xp 64bit versions are all found

Installed up and running no problems, I can run the PhysX demos and they all work fine.

Now to get it working on a game . . . or try to.
I try my MMO that steals so much of my life City of heroes/villians, it has had PhysX support for over 2 years now, nope option is still greyed out. this whole thing is still in beta so it's probably not enabled on the game yet.

So I download a copy of the UT3 demo and PhysX mod patch which nvidia kindly gave links to.
3 hours of downloading later . . . oh dear god why did I bother?? after a hour of trying to get this going, getting totally stuck on the logon screen and lots on internet searching (damb google is going down hill ) I discover that yes you need an online "gamespy" account to even play it offline
And the create account thing is totally buggered, kept gettign account name already in use, even from my 10 random letter names finally got one to be execpted 12 random charactures, only to discover that the @ key will not work, which is helpful when it want an email address

More searching later, I find a solution, to play off line rename the default profile file to the name you want to logon with and bingo.
Have a play, it's ok looks quite nice, yet another game that lacks actual graphics options and instead gives you a few vague options. another trend that annoies the heck out of me.

Install the PhysX mod, get an error saying it cannot find ut3 umm the game I was just playing maybe? continued anyway.
The game seems no differnt, no new PhysX maps (there should be) back on the internet.
Discover you have to coppy a .dll across to make the new physx work and it appears that ut3 HAS to be installed in the default folder in c:\program files\ to use any new maps. (it might only work on the full game as well)

And that's when I just gave up and uninstalled both ut3 and the mod pack. such a lump of that it's been my displeasure to have on my pc.

The beta drivers seem fine, no problems at all so far running PhysX on the graphics card is still an unknown as the only thing that works atm is the PhysX demos that are part of the driver.