The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a product series that is slowly starting to age. Now it might seem unnatural to hear this, but that's not a bad thing. See, prices of the product have gone down pretty hard, think 20-25%. And since it still is a good performer, you are just getting a nice amount of performance for the money you have to lay down. Products like the one shown today sell for roughly 149 EUR / 179 USD. Fact is, this Galaxy model as tested today, we spotted for 149 USD at Newegg already. Remember, all gaming titles we played, we play at severely high image quality settings. And yet the card still manages to push out very friendly framerates up to a resolution of 1600x1200.

If we drop the framerates discussion for a second, I have to say my... Galaxy did out-do themselves this time. From A to Z I am overcome with the sheer design of the card. Every little intricate detail has been changed up to a point where if you'd see the card for the first time, you'd have no idea what kind of card it would be. Now obviously that doesn't always work out well nor is it guaranteed success, but it certainly does and is for this Galaxy GeForce 9800 GTX+ when we talk about aesthetics.

Also the performance in the mid-range segment is certainly adequate enough, we have a nice custom design, solid color schema, we even have an HDMI port, suffice to say, it's pimped up nicely. Hardware wise there's just very little not to like. But we do stumble into some deficits which are at the very least awkward to me. First off, temperatures of this product run as good as the reference cooler, but it's not necessarily more silent as the fan speed rises to 2800 RPM when the GPU gets hot.

My second remark is power management... there isn't any. The reference GTX+ by itself is a very efficient product and then in desktop mode it should be lowering its clock frequencies on the several GPU domains and memory. This is not happening whatsoever. The 3D clocks remain applied in 2D and low profile 3D mode, and that's wasting unnecessary energy. Things that can easily be addressed and fixed with a proper BIOS, yet very important.

So when we sum things up, I feel Galaxy did a good job design wise. Compared to a reference design, it feels moderately the same when looking at temperatures and overclocking. Cooling wise, a thing or two can still be improved as I'd like to see them focus on more silent products during game sessions. Next to that, power management is something they need to look at. Other than that I can only conclude that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ model as tested today is stunning to look at, and from a design point of view, everything you guys as the Guru3D reader base like to see. It's a decent mid-range performer which will get you some good value for your money.

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