The good folks from Point of View submitted their retail (standard) version of the 9800 GTX for a review. Standard also means reference and the product therefore follows the 100% "official" NVIDIA reference specifications. When we check the BIOS values we notice indeed a 675 MHz core frequency, the shader domain at 1675 MHz and 2200 MHz memory frequency. 

Performance wise this reference based product already is pretty impressive but at a given point in time do expect to see Point of View (PoV) release their "EXO" model with even better clocks. And as our overclocking session will show you, these puppies can clock pretty insanely.

The nice thing about POV is that they'll offer you a three year warranty on this product. So overall we see a reference based product with a pretty awesome bundle and warranty. Let's have a look at that bundle.

First off, small yet important move: POV includes a HDMI adapter by the way, one of the few board-partners actually doing that, great to see !

We got the nasty old troll on the box, included in the packaging we can find:

• GeForce 9800 GTX512 MB
• Driver CD
• 6-pin to Molex power cable
• manual / quick install guide
• VGA->DVI dongle
• HDMI > DVI dongle
• Full game: Frontiers Fuel of War (we'll show you some benchies later on)

As stated above, a nice free game is included, Frontlines: Fuel of War from the Microsoft Game Studio's. An absolutely new and great title bringing additional value to POV's offering.

Power consumption

Alright then, we just installed the card into out test-system and will monitor a couple of pretty important items.

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view the power consumption is not as bad as I expected it to be, yet it is a lot. The card according to our findings will consume close to ~150 Watts.

Our test system contains a Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the nForce 680i mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, DVD-rom and WD Raptor drive.

	Videocard 100% load System Idle 9800 GTX 512 MB 306 165 8800 Ultra 768 MB 365 165 9800 GX2 1024MB 374 168

The methodology is simple: have a wattage monitor keeping a close eye on power consumption during our entire test-session. This device will register the maximum wattage pulled from the wall power outlet.  You are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. We had a total system wattage peak at roughly 306 Watts with the 9800 GTX card installed, which is a lot, but not at all shocking in this era.

The new G92 65nm cores are more power efficient than the G80 generation. So while power consumption is high, it's not at all higher then the last gen 8800 GTX product.

So here's my power supply recommendation:

• A single GeForce 9800 GTX requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 25-30 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.
• A second GeForce 9800 GTX installed is another ballgame though; on this system it requires you to have a 750 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 45 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.
• A third GeForce 9800 GTX requires you to have a 1000 Watt PSU, with recommended 55 AMPs available on the 12 volts rails.

There are many good PSU's out there, please do have a look at our PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSU's for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• overclocking issues
• spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the  PC
• freezes during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down