BFGTech GeForce 9800 GTX @ [H]

Mark_Warner said:
The Physics option is not all that GPU intensive, no but Crysis performance is a delicate balancing act. I found that by setting Physics to Medium, I could set Shaders to High and improve the experience.

On page 4:
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Ah thanks for 'splaining.
 
kush said:
Bottom line, anyone that's been holding off upgrading from 6/7/wtf ever series, and won't wait for the "real" new cards.. Grab a GTS @ $200 while you can (or GT @ ~$20 less; [edit] But you'll probably want to grab the not so hot deal now $30 Accelero S1 (I got the rev 1 @ $17..) due to the shit-tastic cooling[/edit]). You can bet those babies are going to disappear faster than Eliott dumb dumb Spitzer.
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The only problem is that now you cannot find the GTS anymore at $200. Neweggs sold out, other retailers have it for $300+. Add in an after-market heatsink and you end up spending about the same as just getting the 9800GTX. And the 9800GTX is somewhat better, even if it is just 5-10%, thats still an improvement. Plus the lower power/heat, I'd say the 9800GTX is a capable, albeit still disappointing, card.
 
If the Step-Up from an 8800GTS 512 to the 9800GTX were less than say, $40, would you advise someone to make that upgrade?
 
TheBluePill said:
If the Step-Up from an 8800GTS 512 to the 9800GTX were less than say, $40, would you advise someone to make that upgrade?
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Nope, go buy another game with that $40. The 8800GTS 512, which can be had for $199.99 at the moment is the card to own.

Edit: looks like the $199 card is sold out. You can still pickup the BFG version for $224.99 after rebate. If I was looking for a new car I'd take it....oh that's right I already own two. :)
 
Great review as always. I was mulling over the idea of buying one, but it seems its not really better than my existing GTS. Now the question is if I should get a 780i board and another GTS, wait for a 9900 or do absolutely nothing. I am leaning toward nothing, I doubt the new games will be much more intensive than Crysis.
 
Ok review in my books. Too much effort and time wasted on a review that could have been bagged with couple pages in my mind, the differences between 8800GTX and 9800GTX are not that huge. Anyways an boring release, bring on the next gen!

Other than that, anybody count how many times ATI was stated to be crap? Not as many as Rambos kill count but close, one gets the point even without excessive repeat :D
 
The step-up price from EVGA is listed @ $339.99. I paid $319.99 for my GTS. For $20, I'm in.
 
Holy shit, the review just came up and already 5 pages worth of comments.

Anyways looks like the 8800gts keeps up very well. Should of invested in the GTS instead of the GT, oh well
 
Silus said:
Good review as always, but a truly disappointing product. Sure, the price is appealing, but I was expecting a performance increase of at least 30% over the 8800 GTX. This is a little more than an overclocked 8800 GTS 512, which begs to ask, why did NVIDIA launch the 8800 GTS 512 in the first place ?

The only 9 series GeForce worth while, is definitely the 9600 GT IMO.
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At least 30% ? ;)
 
So the 9800 GTX is to the 8800 GTX what the 3870 is to the 2900XT. By that I mean a slight increase in speed and less power consumption.
I'm going to keep waiting to upgrade my X1900XT. I want a single GPU card that is more powerful than a 9800 GTX.
 
dang that sucked. any word on the 9800gt? If it gives me the same performance at a much lower temp then it might have to step upto it given that it comes out within the next 80 days or so.
 
I'd definitely have liked to see dual 9600GT's matched-up against a single 9800GTX, but I think I'll just hold off through the summer and see what comes out. Still probably going to get a totally new rig minus the gpu in a month or two.
 
If the 9800GTX launched at 750mhz+ Core with 1gb on board, (which would have been an easy thing to do..) this would have been a totally different story.. Even with a $399 price tag it would have been an actual successor.
 
As someone who's looking to upgrade in the next year from a 6800 Ultra, I'm pleased to see what seems to be an internal pricing war within Nvidia's line-up. There are now a wide range of high performance cards I can look at choosing from that all are going to be at a great price-point later this year (and some already are).

An SLI setup might actually be something I go for, even though I wasn't planning on it.
 
epGandalf said:
So the 9800 GTX is to the 8800 GTX what the 3870 is to the 2900XT. By that I mean a slight increase in speed and less power consumption.
I'm going to keep waiting to upgrade my X1900XT. I want a single GPU card that is more powerful than a 9800 GTX.
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in the meantime you might want to invest in a 1900 res capable monitor (unless you already have one), because if the products coming down the pipeline are going to be significantly faster than a 8800gtx/3870x2, 1900 will become the new 1600.
 
TheBluePill said:
If the 9800GTX launched at 750mhz+ Core with 1gb on board, (which would have been an easy thing to do..) this would have been a totally different story.. Even with a $399 price tag it would have been an actual successor.
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i was thinking the same thing. With a wider bus as well, then it would have been tempting.
 
I think this lower memory count and lower bus width is all a smart marketing ploy to sell 3 way SLI. This leaves the high end users who are stepping up or buying the 9800GTX feeling inadequate. How to make up for that... Buy 3!!! :D

I'm only excited at the possiblility of the 8800GTX becoming EOL and the price dropping to just over $200. This way I'll buy a second and flash my custom bios which is almost on par with a 8800 Ultra. This should hold me over until the 9900GTX/9900GX2 or the next GPU which should actually bring something new and worthwhile to the table arrives.

Booooo Nvidia :D
 
Now I'm not regreting buying that 8800GTS for $200 that was part of yesterdays [H]otdeals.
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+1. And nothing has replaced those deals yet. Seems like a trick that all the rebates expired the day before this release, forcing people to gamble/guess on how the 9800GTX would fare. A conspiracy?

Nice review, Mark. I like that you even included overclocking results, which to me are the only possible point to this card. You also mentioned that it did not significanly change the playability of the tested games. Nice. Just the kind of stuff I like to see in a review. Very useful. But what I still haven't figured out is whether the 9800GTX actually has higher binned chips than the 8800GTS 512. I think it would have been nice to also include reference figures for typical 8800 GTS 512 overclocks for the lazy. Now I am forced to go look for those numbers.
 
Mark_Warner said:
The 8800 GTX early adopters got the deal of the century, in my opinion.
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yep.. I have been saying this for a while now.. we got a lil spoiled with them. :) I bought one on release then another about two months later.. the OCing ability of the 9800GTX looks very appealing, but I dunno.. I can already play lotro at the res I like with eye candy maxed and great fps..
 
Lord_Exodia said:
I think this lower memory count and lower bus width is all a smart marketing ploy to sell 3 way SLI. This leaves the high end users who are stepping up or buying the 9800GTX feeling inadequate. How to make up for that... Buy 3!!! :D
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It's exactly the low RAM and smaller bus that'll make this card practically useless for SLI. Who cares about all that horsepower if you only have 512mb@256bit to work with?
 
Mark_Warner said:
The 8800 GTX early adopters got the deal of the century, in my opinion.
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Yeah, I 100% agree... I bought my card the day they became available, and at the time I thought I was spending too much money for one component... but damn... Nov 8th 2006 (just looked) and it's still chugging along merrily. 17 months (and counting) out of 1 piece of "high end" hardware is amazing in my book....

I did just step up another computer from a recently purchased 8800GTX to one of the new 9800GX2 after seeing the performance of the 9800GTX wasn't what I was hoping for.
 
Well I was right about this entire line of cards. Whodathunkit? The ONLY game that people care to see big increases in is Crysis. Even the 9800GX2 can't pull adequate numbers in that game. nVidia should make DAMN sure they get 50-60fps AVG in Crysis @ 1920x1200 Very High on their next flagship card or I PROMISE they will see a huge drop in game sales and hardware sales. People will straight up leave PC behind and take up console gaming. I love gaming on my PC, but if nVidia and ATi aren't going to deliver the performance I want to see in my games I am just not going to bother. If you think I am in a minority you have another thing coming. Trends are already showing people moving to consoles from PC. Give people even more incentive to game on consoles over PC and you will see the PC gaming market dry up. I have said this numerous times before and I have been flamed for it, but it is the truth.
 
Pyroja said:
It's exactly the low RAM and smaller bus that'll make this card practically useless for SLI. Who cares about all that horsepower if you only have 512mb@256bit to work with?
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How does having less RAM make SLi useless? Each card still performs as a single card it's not like the RAM doubles so there isn't any loss in performance due to less ram on a card just because you are now running two of them instead of one.

If one is faster, two will be faster as well.
 
bluehaze013 said:
How does having less RAM make SLi useless? Each card still performs as a single card it's not like the RAM doubles so there isn't any loss in performance due to less ram on a card just because you are now running two of them instead of one.

If one is faster, two will be faster as well.
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True, but the core on these cards is getting fast enough that they could utilize the extra frame buffer space.

The 8800GT couldn't, per the review of the 1gb card, but these faster clock certainly could..
 
sad, nVida needs to stop this series naming debacle, latley they have been confusing us with names that don't match there performance, or there tech upgrades.

thanks to stale competition from ATI we get rehashed, nerfed performance and no new architecture.

we need something that will truely let us play crysis maxed out, and ready for the games to come.

On the other hand, nVidias price/performance releases have been OUTSTANDING. My 8800gt that i got for 202 bucks delivers near gtx performance on the resolutions i play on, with less power consumption and lighter profiles.

I have really been impressed with the g92 series as far as price goes, but nvidia needs to come out with a true high end product soon.

I was excited about this card until i heard of the 256 bit inteface and lower memory

was kinda expecting this
 
What's killing me is; we have 9800 GTX and still talking about playing Crysis at Medium settings overboard at high res with <30 FPS.

Has there been any other time where one game was far beyond what the current top hardware could handle? As far as I remember we used to always complain about how we drop hundreds of dollars on latest video GPUs at launch without any software that was able to max the cards capabilities until months down the road.
 
bluehaze013 said:
How does having less RAM make SLi useless? Each card still performs as a single card it's not like the RAM doubles so there isn't any loss in performance due to less ram on a card just because you are now running two of them instead of one.

If one is faster, two will be faster as well.
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Your post didn't really make a lot of sense, but let me explain my line of thought...

With SLI, you have available to you only as much RAM as is on one card. So when you take 2 9800GTXs, you have all the shader horsepower of 2 cards (Not getting into losses here..) but the RAM of one.

We can see already there are situations where the 9800GTX is memory starved, which is where the 8800GTX will out pace it, as it has 50% more ram, and a 50% wider bus to access it with.

So, if one lonely 9800GTX is kind of memory starved, then 2 9800GTX's are very memory starved, and 3 are incredibly memory starved. Which means the benefits of SLI will not be huge, and probably not worth the investment.

You can only fit so much into your framebuffer, and once you hit the limit, it doesn't matter much how fast you can churn the data, because a lot of time will be wasted waiting for the framebuffer to catch up.

And when you only have 512mb, in a day and age where people are gaming at 1920 and higher and wanting top performance while doing so, that framebuffer runs out really fast.
 
djfreex said:
What's killing me is; we have 9800 GTX and still talking about playing Crysis at Medium settings overboard at high res with <30 FPS.

Has there been any other time where one game was far beyond what the current top hardware could handle? As far as I remember we used to always complain about how we drop hundreds of dollars on latest video GPUs at launch without any software that was able to max the cards capabilities until months down the road.
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Bingo
 
POPEGOLD said:
The door is WIDE open for AMD to come back hard with its 4870 and 4870X2
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Yeah honestly I could care less who provides the performance as long as the performance is solid. I haven't owned an ATi card since the 9800 series ironically. If ATi can deliver the performance I expect then I will go Crossfire even.
 
Very nice Review Mark.
But this blows...Even If I didn't expect a miracle I still hoped it would be somewhat worth it.

I've been waiting for the 9800GTX (I have a 6600GT) to decide what to do for my new rig and now i'm lost.
Everything else was decided (Iiyama 24", E8400, 4G DDR2, Abit P35....)

now i feel like I should really wait for Nehalem but a whole rig based around that is going to cost a lot of $
and DDR3 still kinda sucks.

I want to upgrade damn it! :/
 
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