Introduction

The GeForce 9800 GT has been around for a long time, actually much longer then you probably know. NVIDIA the past two years has had a tendency of refreshing their products. Sometimes this involves minor technical updates, ASIC or even configuration changes. That's not always the case though. Today's product is an example of that. A long time ago in a Galaxy far far away, the GeForce 8800 GT was born. Last year this exact same product got rebranded by NVIDIA as the GeForce 9800 GT. This year they'll even take it a notch up, the 9800 GT is to be rebranded as GeForce GTS 240.

Make no mistake ladies and gentlemen .. it's all the same product, with minor changes here and there. Granted though, probably one of the most successful GPUs ever made in the history of NVIDIA, is in fact the 8800 series. I mean, how many of you still have a GeForce 8800 GTX and still adore it ?

The 8800 and thus 9800 GT series still offer so much bang for the bucks and it is with that in mind we'll go for yet another 9800 GT review.

Here's the thing, the GPU embedded in this card is so much tweaked and optimized that it's still a good GPU for budget to mid-range gaming. Next to that, the prices have gone down a lot. The product tested today sells for 135 USD, and though relabeled into infinity or not  .. that's just a lot of bang for the buck. If you game in-between a monitor resolution of 1024x768 to 1600x1200, you'll get a pretty fair deal on your gaming experience for the money you need to put down at the cash register.

Next to the fact that the 9800 GT still is a fun product, we test a product from the guys at Galaxy, and that means customization and extra features, all for a fair price. Custom PCB, custom cooling, custom bracket, HDMI output, black DVI+backplate heck it even packs 1024MB of memory to play around with for roughly the same money as a 512MB model. All fairly impressive really.

Over the next few pages we'll have a little chat about that GeForce 9800 GT architecture, then dive into a photo-shoot, technology briefing and obviously a gaming test with the hottest gaming titles on the globe, next page please.