Is a 9800gx2 enough for modern gaming?

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Jazzy1

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First of all, I'm not the type of person who needs to game at 2560X1600 with all the highest details and AA on.I just casually game at resolutions of 1440X900 and 1680X1050. .I Currently have a 9800gt and yes I know it is considered crap by some hardcore gamers but for me it still gets the job done.Games such as Mafia 2, Skyrim, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Just Cause 2, Dirt3 etc all run well considering the date of the system. My system is a core2duo based pc with 4gigs ddr2 ram and the games still look and run better than the console versions.I know the 9800gx2 is a 2008 card but i thought that since the performance in theory is supposed to be twice that of a single 9800gt, it might be worth it.I also saw that the 9800gx2's performance is comparable or if not a bit better than the gtx260. I'm eventually going to build me an i5 sandy bridge setup with the 9800gx2 but for now i'll put the card in my g31 motherboard.Considering that the Gx2 is a dual gpu card, I also need clarity as which games will make use of both gpu's.Any help would be appreciated.

 
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87ninefiveone
From what I gather a GX2 is basically two 9800 GTX cards on one board, since the 9800 GTX was later released as a GTS 250 then basically it's the slightly slower equivalent of two GTS 250's which isn't much to write home about now days.

Although it contains two GPU's the GX2 will never double the performance of your current 9800 GT card. You'll typically see a 50% or so improvement in frame rate (sometimes more sometimes less). The only thing that would interest me about the GX2 is if it was capable of going three way SLI with your current 9800 GT. I see that Quad SLI is supported on the GX2, but not three way (at least not specifically). If that was the case it might be more tempting because you'd have a decently fast setup with...
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It's a DX9 card. Today's games like Skyrim are DX11, so while it may seem like it plays decent (which I find very hard to believe) your missing out on the full effect.

Not really sure what your asking, you have a 9800GT, but your asking about a 9800GX2. Your not actually considering buying a 9800GX2 are you?? It makes no sense, there are inexpensive DX11 cards that are faster and use 1/3 the power of a DX9 9800GX2.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html
 
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Jazzy1

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The 9800gx2 is a DX10 card. Graphics cards also cost too much here in South Africa.The crap thing is that newegg doesn't ship to South Africa.
 
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87ninefiveone

87ninefiveone

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From what I gather a GX2 is basically two 9800 GTX cards on one board, since the 9800 GTX was later released as a GTS 250 then basically it's the slightly slower equivalent of two GTS 250's which isn't much to write home about now days.

Although it contains two GPU's the GX2 will never double the performance of your current 9800 GT card. You'll typically see a 50% or so improvement in frame rate (sometimes more sometimes less). The only thing that would interest me about the GX2 is if it was capable of going three way SLI with your current 9800 GT. I see that Quad SLI is supported on the GX2, but not three way (at least not specifically). If that was the case it might be more tempting because you'd have a decently fast setup with three of the running, but depending on how much the GX2 costs (hopefully not a lot, no more than $50-75 US), you may be better off looking at newer cards which can run discretely and provide even more graphics muscle with no where near the power draw as a tri-SLI setup. I'd look into a GTS 450, or a 550 Ti if I were you, both of which should run around $150-175 US, or maybe a HD 6870 at the same price point with even more muscle.
 
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CaedenV

CaedenV

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The GX2 is simply SLi running on a single card. Expect an 50-80% increase in performance on titles that support SLi, otherwise there will be little to no difference at all. You would be better off purchasing a 2nd 9800GT and doing your own SLi if your system supports it. But if purchasing a newer GPU then you would want to buy a newer mid-range model as they will take much less power, get better frame rates, and support newer games and technologies better (more onboard RAM helps too :) ). Keep in mind that your CPU is going to bottleneck your system for anything much more powerful than a 9800GT, especially on CPU oriented games like Skyrim, so really you should be saving up for a new computer, not a new GPU.
 
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Jazzy1

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Are you sure it won't double performance. A 8800gt is equivalent to a 9800gt and in the benchmarks that iv'e seen, the 9800gx2's framerate is mostly double that of an 8800gt in most cases.
 
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vitornob

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Actually Skyrim is a DX9 game only
 
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bigj231

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I have a Radeon HD 4870X2, and the 9800GX2 seems to be an equivalent card. It has no problem whatsoever with slightly older games, and it runs Skyrim smoothly on high settings at 1440x900.
Just be aware that the dual GPU cards require a lot of power and run much hotter than the single CPU variants. Also, some games don't scale very well in crossfire, so you may not see any increase in performance from your current card. Just figure it will be equivalent to about 1.5 of your cards.

EDIT: GPU not CPU.
 
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nocteratus

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9800GX2 has 1Gb of RAM GDDR3 (512Mb per GPU) and it's DX10.
It's not a crappy card, just don't expect miracles from this card.
Yeah it's hot. It plays old games very nicely at low resolution. I know I have one and I'll trade it any day for a HD6850 or better.
I've purchased the card when it was EOL and paid half price, upgrading from a 8800GTS 320Mb. The upgrade was worth it at that time but I won't recommend buying this card now when they're better cards out there.
 
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mightymaxio

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I have a 7950 gx2, a 9800 gx2, and a 295 gtx, after getting the "best" single cards i decided that they are junk because of scaling and other issues. That's why i will not buy another dual gpu card because no matter all the talk of perfecting the wrongs they still end up having issues.
 
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geekapproved

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But it's still only seen as a 512mb card, not a 1gb card, you cannot just combine them and say it has a 1gb buffer, it has a 512mb buffer.
 
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Boopoo

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GTX 295 was OK but still not consider a wild success and all the other Nvidia dual GPU cards before it were worse if not even atrocious however the new Nvidia and Radeon Dual GPU cards are great albeit not without there intrinsic faults like heat and noise but the performs and scaling and drivers is great.
 
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