18 - The way too long conclusion
The Verdict
Scottish accent - "Oy matey the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a bitching fast product, and I do mean that in a nice way !"
British accent - "Sorry to say doubling up the components needed to make this product also meant a significant increase in pricing. This can never be a cheap product."
[Brittish Ed - OK I just spat my drink all over my screen and keyboard. Thanks Hilbert! Come to Britain and we'll try the above again. Yeesh]
Crap, its going to be one of these complex conclusions again. You could already tell by the length of this page right ? Ah well .. here we go. First off my biggest frustration, that anal 8-pin power connector .. it's just friggin silly that something as simple as an 8-pin connector actually can cause problems. A good number of power supplies will not fit the 9800 GX2 8-pin connector at all. Please - read our chapter (page 9) on that one so you know how you can solve it, it isn't pretty .. but it's do-able. And granted, NVIDIA follows the form factor precisely, it's the PSU manufacturers however let that connector slip away a little making the retention clips slightly too big to fit on the GX2. But still, silly.
Okay we got that out of the way, next up pricing. Surely the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a notch cheaper than the EOL GeForce 8800 Ultra, but you can expect prices of 599 USD and for these free thinking Eupeeaaans 499-549 EUR at launch. And that's a bit of a culprit for this product. Now I would have loved to include two GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards setup in SLI as well in this test. But the two cards that I have do not mix in SLI (clocks/brand differ). Two 8800 GTS 512MB cards will however would be slightly faster than one 9800 GX2. And I've seen NewEgg selling them for like 219 USD a piece ... I'll try to include some 8800 GTS 512MB SLI results in our VGA charts soon, but that might be a real nice alternative to the 9800 GX2, in fact even slightly faster.
What NVIDIA should realize is that the high-end segmented products already became too expensive two years ago. It's nice to have the flagship product, it's nice to have little to no competition in this high-end segment of the market, and surely a product like the GX2 will bring a lot of media coverage, yet that gaming community refuses to spend 500-600 bucks on a product to just play games. Let me explain my demonic theory on that ...
The PC games industry right now is under attack, we see a huge movement of end-users moving towards consoles. The PS3 for example does astonishing things graphics, gaming, multimedia and (@ folding) wise, comes even with a Blu-ray player and heaps of processing power for a lesser the price than one GeForce 9800 GX2. The irony here is that the PS3 is actually powered by an NVIDIA graphics GPU. Well, first off to me that looks like killing your own core business. So I'm making a strong plea here .. keep high-end enthusiast graphics under the 400 EUR pricetag. Playing games on a PC needs to revert to the old pricing level to be able to survive. Well, that and if applicable to you, you guys really need to stop pirating games.
Now, a really good move was in the GeForce 9600 GT and the 8800 GT, that's where the success of the gaming experience is to be found, yet these lovely cards did arrive on the scene a little late don't you agree ? Imagine what such immensely popular graphics cards could have done for game sales in 2007 ?
We need the magic back in gaming. The way I see it; consumers are tired of paying 300+ USD for a graphics card that needs to be replaced 12 months later, and most of all they are tired of coughing up a stunning 60 EUR for a game. This is why people pirate games that much Mr. Sweeney (and you are a mentally challenged if you believe UT can be played better on a console).
So yes, I adore and seriously actually mean worship the technology industry, especially 3D rendering makes my heart go faster. Every scene that is rendered, the pixel pipeline the level of graphics quality we have reached all that is just amazing. But in order for PC gaming to succeed it needs to remain affordable and that's a very big culprit right now as the enthusiast segment took off to uncharted territories money wise.
See the plot to my demonic theory is simple .. it's the end-users in that enthusiast segment that drive, steer, motivate and evangelize the mainstream gamers to go for that PC graphics card and game on their PC. You guys and girls are the ones that set the standard. When the high-end segment is getting too expensive it will drive exactly these gamers that normally buy that "Oeltra" to the console platform. Gaming is about emotion and passion embedded into a virtual world that comes to life with the help of your graphics card. We need that 1997 3Dfx feeling back, and once that feeling is back among you guys (the gaming guru's out there) the magic will return. Its like planting little seeds in the gaming industry.
Oh yeah, and obviously the release of Windows Vista wasn't / isn't helping either, forcing people to purchase and install a new operating system and thus again spend a truck-load of money just to be able to play a DX10 game, how upsetting is that ?
But I'm drifting off, back to the actual hardware. BFG, NVIDIA .. dudes ! Without a doubt, if a game is SLI supported (and 95% of the games today are), this is the fastest product you can purchase for that gaming experience. With the computational power that the GX2 brings you'll reach new performance heights that surpasses the mighty GeForce 8800 Ultra at a steep yet lesser price. Any game to date can be played in the highest resolution with the finest image quality settings (except that one title called Crysis of course).
My advise to the NVIDIA driver team is simple, keep this product well supported. I do have very good hopes and look at this prospect in a very positive way, as SLI gaming has advanced and has been integrated way better since that 7950 GX2 was released. But if NVIDIA fails again at driver support .. there will be no room for a future GX2 model.
There are some very notable factors to be found in the the GeForce 9800 GX2, in fact multiple factors. I find it to be a relatively energy efficient product. Roughly 200 Watts, while having 256 shader cores crunching data, that's just not bad man. And fact is that the raw gaming power it can push out is simply magnificent. Next to a bitching nice gaming experience please do not forget that the cards comes with HDMI connector and a plethora of multi-media functions. Embedded into this card of obviously the PureVideo HD engine. All that coolness is embedded in this product as well.
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Our Quad SLI test (yes you can combine two GX2 cards for some bitter or sweet Quad SLI gaming) is still coming though, likely next week we can publish some final results on that one. Rounding it up then, granted in the end the GeForce 9800 GX2 is more of the same, but more is in this case a good amount better as it is faster and somewhat cheaper than a GeForce 8800 Ultra.
The GeForce 9800 GX2 is fun, pure unadulterated fun, but is does come with a high price tag, runs really hot and has a very anal 8-pin power connector. NVIDIA's 9 series obviously is a respin series. Based on last years architecture, yet made with a smaller fabrication processes, slightly more more efficient, and has better power consumption. But is that really enough to satisfy the premium price paying high-end user ? Personally I tend to lean way more towards Single-GPU solutions these days, though my experiences with the 9800 GX2 definitely were excellent and pretty much flawless. The biggest downside remains the pricing level of NVIDIA's high-end products. Surely there's a market for it, but there's just no future for enthusiast PC gaming if we remain at this price-level.
Performance wise the GeForce 9800 GX2 just does nice things. You can not imagine how cool it is to play Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 with every thinkable setting flipped at high and still get razersharp framerates. One of the newest titles I tested was Frontlines: Fuel of War. Again at 2560x1600 we topped framerates close to 60 frames per second, on average ! Things like that make a product like the GeForce 9800 GX2 extremely fascinating. It's that resolution that counts though, do not puchase this card if you play games at a 1280x1024 resoution, please. Only after 1600x1200 the difference will become a real factor. Also please do not forget that this is the fastest "single card solution" VGA card, you do not need a SLI mainboard for it at all. Starting this week the GeForce 9800 GX2 will become available in (r)e-tail with prices hovering from 499 EUR & 599 USD. Many thanks to BFG for supplying the card early and many thanks to NVIDIA for supplying the reference board.
As stated next week we'll peek at Quad SLI, right now you can check out our nForce 790i ULTRA SLI review. Off you go lads, shoohs.
For more info & special thanks to:
