9800GX2 impressions

Annisman

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I have recently upgraded from an 8800GTX to the 9800GX2 and have run numerous benchmarks etc.This card has alot of negative hype surrounding it. I want to help clear that up. It has been said many times that it will run hot and overclock poorly, well this just isn't true. The card runs in the mid 70's and gets around 80 c at the highest. Much cooler IMO compared to the G80 chip which can get near 90-100c. Also, it is a solid overclocker. A surprise. I was able to get mine from 600 core to 745, also the memory is flexible, I was able to achieve 1100mhz, or 2.2Ghz effective. I have not yet fooled around with the shader clock. Unfortunately, so far, Games either run very smoothe, or give me problems. For instance, Crysis at 'High' settings and 4xAA at 1680X1050 gets me frames in the mid 30's. Something my 8800 could not accomplish. However there seems to be a Antialiasing bug in the driver ( i hope ) that will decimate the GX2's performance in some games. Hopefully new drivers are on the way. I am not a fanboy, I simply like who is on top because I always buy the best product out there, ATI or Nvidia. I am just saying that it IS a decent card, and is cheaper than the Ultra also beating it's performance pretty well. For those who have a 8800GTX like I did, well, honestly there is no need to upgrade, not at this time. But if you did decide to upgrade, than there WILL be benefits... for a Price. Any questions ? comments ?
 
Thanx for the info mate :)
Well actually thats not cooler than 8800GTX/ULTRA

My 8800GTX (@ ULTRA ) idles @ 59c and goes to 76
Also if u asked here i wouldnt have recommended u to upgrade to a 9800GX2
For 1680x1050 your 8800GTX did the job
 

Annisman

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While your card may run cool, certainly I have seen many GTX owners ( including myself) that have had to deal with their cards running in the 80's and 90's. It was a generalization. Also, I point out that I DO NOT recommend other GTX owners to upgrade. I was just noting that if they are going to, that they will see performance gains, and a card that CAN overclock well, and run cool. ( at least cooler than expected cmon now.)
 

firebanshee

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I have two issues with this card, both of which deal with heat related issues.

First is the way in which the card cools itself--which is to pump all that warm air right into the center of the case. Depending on the type of case you have, and hardware configurations, this seems a little counter-productive in regards to cooling, almost exactly like peeing in the wind, if I can be so vulgar. The one solution I see includes a case that has fully open drive bay area (i.e. Lian-Li PC80 or 60, Tt Armour, CM 830 series--just to name a few). With this type of cae you can reverse the overall airflow, including the rear fan and CPU cooler, to send all the air out the front of the case, instead of blowing the now-warm air back onto and into the cards. Not only that, but the airflow's path is as important as its speed and volume, meaning that a nice smooth airflow, that doesnt change directions, is the ideal way of evacuating the warm air--sort of like a wind tunnel, eliminating areas of turbulance that allow the warm air "bubbles" to remain stagnate.



Secondly, if you are to quad-Sli these, the top card's already poorly designed cooling vents will be blocked off by the card below it. Unless I am incorrect, no quad-Sli supporting boards have more than one slot between both PCI-E 2.0 slots--as if the board companies have not seen all these new 2-slot cards. So...where is the heat supposed to go? In this case, what little air can escape from the top card is going right onto the back of the second card...huh? That makes no sense.

The second problem isnt just related to this card and sli boards--it affects any similar board when using a 2-slot cards in crossfire or sli configuration when there is only 1 slot between PCI-E slots. Although most other 2-slot VGA cards exhaust the hot air out the back, this configuration still restricts the amount of cool air entering the card.

I just recently built a system using two 3870X2's. When chosing an X38 mainboard, my main requirement was that the PCI-E 2.0 slots were more than one slot apart for that very reason. For GDDR3 memory, the Gigabyte EX38T-DQ6 is the only board on earth with this configuration.

I'm tired of all these multi-media boards for gaming--how about a GAMING board for gaming; 4 PCI-E slots and one PCI for sound--how hard is that? What in the world am I going to do with 3 pci-x slots?
 


Yep i know what u said but i was talking generally about it :)
also yeah u are right some 8800GTX users complain about the temps
 

Hatman

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Thanks for info :) When the next drivers come out which will hopefully fix the AA issues make sure to let us know!!

Also can you test crysis very high no AA for me, thanks.
 

Hatman

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Personally I cant wait for price to come down to £300ish so I can get one over my current 8800GT :p

1920x1200 for w/e reason seems to be where this card really picks up though. Hard to tell without driver optimizations though, if AA doesn't work then theres probably a lot of things that are needed to simply run the game well that don't work too.

You are using the newer drivers though right?
http://downloads.guru3d.com/
 

iluvgillgill

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£300?im not so sure.but im sure Nvidia will drop the price on the 9800GX2 but not sure if it will go anywhere near £300 i live in UK also.I have the same wish as you.but to be honest im more interested in the 9800GTX.
 

Hatman

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9800GTX wont do much better than my card atm, only one pci-e16 slot so im not gonna use crossifre/sli.

GX2 is already down to £380, compared to the £440 price when it very first came out. It'll drop eventually. More so when ATI bring out their revised 3870X2 :)
 

iluvgillgill

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WELL THE 4XXX SERIES IS COMING OUT!SO SCARED!!!!LOL

so how much is the 9800GTX going to be when release.it has much much better overclocking potential than 8800gtx i heard!but from quite alot of sources so i guess its true.

where do you get your parts from anyway?OCUK?Scan?
 

Hatman

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Well you cant really compare 9800GTX to 8800GTX, completly different. 9800 is very similar to 8800GTS 512 and it will be a little more overclockable. Thats about it though. I doubt 9800GTX will be faster then 8800GTX in most situations.


I get mine from overclockers.co.uk and scan.co.uk

Also, Id take the next gen ATI being awesome with a pinch of salt... and even if ti is 50%% faster thats only just ahead of GX2 atm, even with these early drivers :)
 

iluvgillgill

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i do really do think it will be faster than the 8800GTX.even at the same clock dont forget the G92 core are more efficient.thats been prove when the 8800gt 512 compare to the 8800gts 640 which is got wider bandwidth and more memory but the 8800gt still wins inl the games and benchmarks
 

Hatman

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It had more SP's though, whereas 9800GTX and 8800GTX have the same amount. It will have higher clocks yes but 256bit vs 384bit where bandwidth matters quite a bit it will fall behind. Then theres also the fact that GTX has 24ROPS while 9800GTX will only have 16. Clock for clock 8800GTX still comes out king, just depends on how high the 9800GTX can clock.


Will be better in msot other ways though, less heat and less power consumption. Tri-Sli should improve a bit too, they would be silly if they havent found a way to optimize it yet because atm its just pointless. From what Ive seen even the new quad-sli works better than tri-sli.
 

iluvgillgill

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as i have posted somewhere else Nvidia have something up theie sleeve.something new and big and better must be coming out or under development.how can a top end have 256bit bandwidth right?

product will only improve or stay still like have the 384bit bus or more!just like the 9600gt got 256bit bus grow from 128bit from the previous gen 8600gts.
 
The bus bandwidth isnt as important as the amount of memory, partially solved by a compression of data. The rops, you could be right, though maybe 24 is overkill. The 9800GTX card will tell us that.
 

iluvgillgill

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yeah just wait for 1 april.fools day.do you think Nvidia is tricking us with a joke again?by releasing it earlier or later?as they always feel like doing!lol just like the GX2 i think i got push back 1-2 weeks right?
 
Heres more on the compression thing, a little vague Ill admit, but a difference maker for sure :" The differences between G9x and G8x are small, but even so details were light. Their compression technology has evolved to provide higher effective bandwidth between the GPU and framebuffer. We would love to provide more details on this and the other changes, but NVIDIA is still being a bit tight lipped." Thats from anands review of the 9600gt
 

iluvgillgill

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i guess as technology gets better and Nvidia got so much money and time to develop their technology after their 8800GTX is so successful!and if their product doesnt get better than i guess the Nvidia boss will cut their pay of sack them!lol
just a quick question have are keep an eye on intel's new Nehalem CPU?you think its gonna wipe out AMD from how much new technology is pack inside that thing?!
 

iluvgillgill

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well i mean now amd is better than intel only at memory speed and latency because its got built-in memory controller.but hehale, is gonna have that as well.and the gen after nehalem is gonna have gpu as well.intel sure is gready wanna eat up the whole IT market.imagine it team up with microsoft!!!NO!!!!!
 

Annisman

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Very well, I will see what I can do. Vista is acting up on me so I am only using XP atm. Does anybody want to see the hacked version of Crysis in all of it's glory ? IMO it looks just as good and runs better.