Inno3D GeForce 9800 GT Twin Turbo review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/07/2008 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

18 - Final words

The Verdict

The GeForce 8800 GT and 9800 GT boil down to exactly the same product with subtle nuances from the AIBs here and there, there is just not much difference, however there absolutely still is market enough for a product like this. It performs adequately, read that well, adequately... yet we are getting closer to 2009 and I do believe that NVIDIA's sub-150 USD segment could use an upgrade to something faster as I do want to see a little more bang for my bucks.

The good news is that the 9800 GT products can be found anywhere and they are pretty darn affordable. I just browsed a little and you will be able to pick up the regular 9800 512MB GT for 129 USD, and that's a nice price considering the value you'll get in return. The fact remains that the 9800 GT series is competing closely with the two most popular mid-range products, the 200 USD Radeon 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+.

The Twin Turbo iChill edition as tested today makes up for some extra. The core and memory overclock give it a little more bite. Major fail however is that Inno3D has grown a habit of not overclocking the shader domain (stream processors), I addressed this issue with other iChill reviews before and am a little puzzled about it. It's like Inno3D would like to advertise the product as overclocked, yet is not going all the way with it, a darn shame, as the product can certainly take much higher clock frequencies on all domains. I mean we pushed the shader domain towards almost 1900 MHz stable, coming from 1512MHz.

This is now the 3rd product from Inno3D where we see this behavior. Despite that fact, the increased core and memory frequency give it a little extra. In some cases overall performance is on par or close to the GeForce 9800 GTX+, and let's not forget that this product is roughly 40 USD cheaper - that's value.

So other than that shader clock remark, the iChill version of this 9800 GT is a really lovely product which we highly encourage you to purchase. We see very nice temperatures and silent operation. The aesthetics are good and it even comes with an okay bundle. If you can pick up this product for roughly 125-150 USD then I say fair deal, as you will not regret it, it's enough performance for any modern game at a decent resolution.

Overall, a very lovely product which we can definitely recommend, the next best thing for you would be the GeForce 9800 GTX+ or Radeon HD 4850 which are slightly more expensive.

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