NVIDIA (BFG) GeForce 9800 GTX. Got £200 for a graphics card? Read this

[HEXUS]

Expecting monumental performance increases from the GeForce 9800 GTX? You may well be disappointed.

Read more.

[matty-hodgson]

the bang4buck page on the graph at the bottom shows that it performs worse than an 8800GTX..

it OCs very well though.. nearly 2.5GHz memory speeds :O

[Lucio]

I hate the 1st April, you sit there with a reasonably convincing article but, at the back of your mind you're thinking "there's no reason for this to be true"

[Azza]

Would be a good buy if the 8800GT and GTS 512mb didnt exist.

[choc]

Ok, something has been puzzling me for the last few reviews...

... why dont you use the same system to test all of the components on? You have the ATI cards running on one system and Nvidia on another. And they dont use the same memory.

Also the drivers you are using are in some cases old (october 2007), as are the game patches and because of this I am not even sure if the results give a true reflection on what the current comparisons are.

Whats going on? Some clarification on the impact of the above things would be appreciated.

Oh, and on the system setup page the square advert overhangs the table in Firefox 2 unless you have the window really wide.

I have other questions but i'll leave it at that for now.

Edited. Didnt mean for my original post to sound as harsh Just need some clarification so i can understand what the review is or isnt telling me. thx

[JARSmith]

... why dont you use the same system to test all of the components on? You have the ATI cards running on one system and Nvidia on another. And they dont use the same memory.

In all of our testing, we do our best to ensure that the results are as comparable as can be.
However we need to balance this against the need to test components in a fair and appropriate environment.
Part of doing this involves using the various chip manufacturers recommended platforms for testing their products.
In this case; up until just very recently, the recommended platform to test high-end NVIDIA GPU based cards on, was to use an NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI chipset motherboard.

Likewise we use the MSI X48 based for similar reasons as it's an appropriate Intel CPU based, AMD CrossFire certified platform.
We'd preferred to have used a DDR2 based motherboard, however at the time (at the beginning of January), the X48 boards that were available were few and far between and most were DDR3 based.
In real-world game play you'll be hard pushed to tell the difference between identically equipped machines, with equivalent speed DDR3 vs. DDR2 modules anyway, let alone be able to reliably measure the difference in frame-rates, hence this small compromise was deemed acceptable.

In my experience (and indeed some of my colleagues), we've found it unwise in the past to mix video drivers from NVIDIA and AMD on the same software build.
In some cases it can result in additional crashing whilst benchmarking and sometimes even problems during driver installation.

nForce 790i Ultra SLI boards recently became available at retail, and thus we'll begin evaluating these boards soon with a view to upgrading the NVIDIA graphics test platform.

Also the drivers you are using are in some cases old (october 2007), as are the game patches and because of this I am not even sure if the results give a true reflection on what the current comparisons are.

Due to the sheer volume of test permutations required; to test each and every card across multiple games and resolutions, it's not feasible to always run with the latest drivers.
However, we do check the release notes of all newly released video drivers before running any new benchmarks results, and if we find that there has been a performance improvement, or fix related to any of the games we use, then we update to that driver and mention the reasons in the system setup and notes page, or the relevant results page of the review.

We also keep an eye on the game patch level and if there are bug fixes which may affect performance, or GPU vendor related fixes e.g. fixes specific to NVIDIA or AMD GPU's then we will patch the game to the latest version.

[choc]

Thanks for the response. I think that i would prefer to see more identical systems etc but i understand there are time constraints so i guess i will use other sites for exact comparisons. If nothing else i guess your results give me a completely different outlook to sites which test on identical stuff.

[shaffaaf27]

why dont you use more up to date games, such as cod4?

[matty-hodgson]

why dont you use more up to date games, such as cod4?

'cause my old P2 133MHz 64MB RAM integrated Graphics system can run that game!

[kchakkar]

I think I'll wait for the Nvidia g200. The performance increase does not justify the price.