Specifications
Point of View supplied the sample card. It is identical to the reference design except for a sticker. Bundles will vary. Point of View will provide a DVI to VGA adapter and a PCI Express 6 pin to 2 Molex adapter, which is quite obsolete for such a card.
Outputs include two DVI-I ports and an HDMI port. Like the 9600 GT, the 9800 GX2 has an HDMI-in, located next to the additional power connectors for linking with the motherboard's PCB or a sound card.
| Main Cards Specifications | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | HD 3870 X2 | 9800 GX2 | 8800 Ultra |
| GPU clock | 825 MHz | 600 MHz | 612 MHz |
| Shaders clock | 825 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1512 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 900 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1080 MHz |
| Width of the memory bus | 2x256 bits | 2x256 bits | 384 bits |
| Memory Type | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 |
| Amount of Memory | 2 x 512 MB | 2x512 MB | 768 MB |
| Number of Pixels/Vertex Pipelines | (160) | (64) | (32) |
| Number of Texturing Units | 32 | 128 | 32 |
| ROP | 32 | 32 | 24 |
| Throughput | ~1 TFlops | 768 GFlops | 387 GFlops |
| Memory Bandwidth | 115.2 GB/s | 128 GB/s | 103.7 GB/s |
| Number of transistors | 1334 millions | 1010 millions | 754 millions |
| Process | 0.055µ | 0.065µ | 0.080µ |
| Die surface | 2 x 196 mm² | 2 x 324 mm² | 484 mm² |
| Generation | 2008 | 2008 | 2007 |
| Shader Model supported | 4.1 | 4.0 | 4.0 |
When it comes to specifications, we would like to see more memory (512 MB of really usable memory compared to the other cards) and more memory bus (there are 256 bits, although we can multiply this by two). NVIDIA has the upper hand for most of the other specs. Memory bandwidth, but mostly texturing units weigh in favor of the chameleon (with a filtrate three times superior). AMD has better raw throughput, but we know its actual architecture is less efficient. The 9800 GX2 has also the upper hand when it comes to die surface, which means cheaper production costs.