MaximumPC 2008 06

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

C

ompared to AMD’s gracefully en-

gineered Radeon 3870 X2, Nvidia’s

GeForce 9800 GX2 (represented here

by Gigabyte’s implementation) is something of

a kludge. But when we consider the perfor-

mance that Nvidia’s design delivers, it’s hard to

complain about elegance.

Both AMD’s and Nvidia’s solutions deliver

dual-GPU performance from a single PCI Ex-

press slot without requiring chipset support (and

in both cases, adding chipset support allows you

to run four GPUs in one system). AMD’s solution,

however, plants two Radeon 3870 GPUs and

two 512MB frame buff ers on a single printed

circuit board; Nvidia’s design entails taking two

PCBs (each with a G92 processor and 512MB of

GDDR3 memory), bolting them together, and

sticking a ribbon cable in between. It’s a quick-

and-dirty brute-force solution, but it delivers

frame rates like nobody’s business.

Gigabyte hewed closely to Nvidia’s refer-

ence design, clocking the GPU cores at 600MHz,

the shaders at 1.5GHz, and the memory at

1GHz. Pay no attention to what Nvidia’s website

says, the chip’s memory interface is 256 bits

wide, not 512. It seems both Nvidia and AMD

have realized that wider interfaces weren’t

delivering as much performance as they had

anticipated; these days, 256-bit memory inter-

faces are de rigueur even at the high end.

We’ve given up bench-

marking Crysis at 1920x1200,

and no card has yet delivered

what we’d call acceptable

performance even with the

1280x720, 2x AA settings

we’ve been using—until now:

The 9800 GX2 pumped out

41.4 frames per second.

Maximum PC readers

don’t live by games alone,

and you obviously don’t

need two G92s to watch a Blu-ray movie,

but we’re happy to report that the 9800 GX2

includes Nvidia’s excellent PureVideoHD for

offloading high-definition video decoding

from the host CPU. The HDMI socket on the

mounting bracket saves you from having

to use an adapter, but getting digital audio

to that connector involves another kludge:

a cable from your motherboard header to a

socket on the card (AMD’s solution routes

digital audio over the bus).

But if we can’t have both, we’ll take beast

over beauty any day of the

week. – M I C H A E L B R O W N

Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GX2

More beast than beauty

The 9800 GX2 supports HybridPower, so if

you’re using a Hybrid SLI mobo (a Socket

AM2+ model with an nForce 720a or

nForce 730a chipset), you can save power

while running less-demanding applica-

tions by shutting down both its GPUs and

using integrated graphics.

+ -

VERDICT

$600, http://www.gigabyte.us.com

9

Great for gaming.

HDMI on the mounting

bracket.

Kinda kludgy—

especially the audio

cable for the HDMI port.

BRUTE FORCE

GIGABYTE GEFORCE 9800 GX2

BRUT COLOGNE

Best scores are bolded. AMD-based cards tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs and 2GB of

Corsair DDR RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks performed on ViewSonic VP2330wb monitors. For Vista results, see http://tinyurl.com/3ss7s2.

BENCHMARKS

GIGABYTE GEFORCE9800 GX2 MSI RADEON3870 X2

Windows XP

3DMark06 Game 1 (FPS)

3DMark06 Game 2 (FPS)

Crysis (DX9) (FPS)

Unreal Tournament 3 (FPS)

51.2 48.0

41.0 42.3

41.4 22.6

108.8 90.4

78 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com