Introduction
We received a testing sample of Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2 a few days ago and are able to report our test findings today. The card is not quite ready for prime time. For example, the drivers provide such poor performance that Quad SLI benchmarks had to be postponed. But, we are ready to report on our findings in other areas.
Nvidia 9800 GX2 manufactured by Point of View
Nvidia's objective with the GeForce 9800 GX2 is simple, as with all very high end cards. The company wants to take back the coveted title of the most powerful 3D card that NVIDIA surprisingly lost by a small margin when ATI's Radeon 3870 X2 came out. It doesn't seem natural, even today, to build a card on two mainstream chips. Yet, as we've noted before, it's a design that has some advantages from a production point of view.
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We aren't the only ones to take this position. NVIDIA's CEO himself stated last month that he was convinced the GeForce 8800 GTX remained the most powerful card and that a single GPU board was the best approach, though if a dual-GPU board was the fastest in the world, it would be accepted. Is that the case with the GeForce 9800 GX2?
