No April Fool's, Tuesday marked the launch of the GeForce 9800 GTX and it was a long time coming. You have to go all the way back to early November 2006 for the very first DirectX 10 cards launched, Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS. Who knew at the time that it would be so long until these cards true follow ups some seventeen months later. But at last it has arrived and while it won't have the earth shattering effect the GeForce 8800 GTX had it is quite a worthy competitor.

As you might expect Nvidia's 9800 GTX has a lot in common with all the recent cards they've released in that it is based off the G92 core that the 8800 GT, 8800 GTS 512MB, and more recent 9600 GT all share. To sum it up quickly the major difference between this and the G80 core the previous generation of DX10 cards were based on is the die shrink to 65nm to cut down on die size, costs, and power consumption. It features 128 shaders with a default clockspeed of 675MHz for the core and 1.69GHz for the shaders with a 2.2GHz memory clockspeed with 512MB of RAM using a 256-bit memory bus. This might seem a little odd to some people who know the GeForce 8800 GTX specs as that card featured 768MB of RAM with a 384-bit memory interface, so higher in regards to the GeForce 9800 GTX. That said there were more than likely some efficiency issues in regards to texture management which have been resolved with better drivers and revised hardware but it still seems on paper to be one of the few times a newer product has lower specs than the previous generation. ATI also did this with their Radeon 3870 moving from a 512-bit memory interface to 256-bit and that card was much faster than the 2900 XT. The stream processor number holds steady at 128 though the clock speed is 100MHz faster than the default of the GeForce 8800 GTX which was 575MHz compared to 675MHz.

The card is also significantly lighter in weight than the 8800 GTX due to the heatsink not being one huge piece of aluminum though it is still two slots and quite large. The card is covered in a dark, shiny, black shroud that upon first notice the first thing to pop into my head was Darth Vader's Helmet. These cards are also cooler running than the 8800 GTX but still put off quite a bit of heat from their exhaust vent.

Unfortunately even though the 9800 GTX should consume less power with the die shrink and smaller memory interface it still requires two six-pin PCI-Express plugs to function and of course if you go SLI you'll need four. Something you don't want to forget if you do plan to go that route.

We also have one of the very first overclocked 9800 GTX cards from Foxconn which runs at 780MHz for the core speed and 2.36GHz for the memory. We'll give a more in-depth review of that card later on as we're short on time. Our other card is an Asus EN9800 GTX which runs at stock speeds as well and we'll combine the two for SLI scores.

One other unique feature of the 9800 GTX is the dual golden fingers that rest at the top of the cards which is shared only by the GeForce 8800 GTX, 8800 GTX Ultra. Unfortunately it seems if you want to try triple SLI cash will have to be no issue as only their highest-end cards feature it. This is somewhat disappointing as we're very curious how triple 9600 GT or 8800 GT cards might perform.

Both of our Asus and Foxconn cards featured somewhat similar bundles though a few different perks. They both included an HDTV dongle, DVI-to VGA adapters, and two molex to six pin PCI-Express power adapter. Fairly standard, however Asus included a new leather bound CD wallet and Foxconn included their usually back-up software so interesting twists from both of them. No games were included but those can be hit or miss and if it is one you already have or don't want the benefit is lacking. The Asus leather CD wallet is an upgrade from ones we've seen previously from them so we included a picture of it. Both Foxconn and Asus also included overclocking utilities that we'll go into more in-depth in their own reviews.

Let's move onto our system specs and benchmarks including our new 30" LCD screen.

Here's our current test system.

We've increased our monitor size to Samsung's 30" LCD which features a 2560x1600 native resolution, perfect for the high-end 9800 GTX. Our drivers were ATI Catalyst 7.3 and Forceware 174.74 drivers. V-sync was disabled for all test and Windows Vista Home was our test OS. Every game was tested at the highest playable settings possible except Crysis on "High" with no anti-aliasing.

Want to play Crysis on "High" above 1920x1200 above 30fps? Then look to a pair of 9800 GTX cards to do so at least on AMD's best setup as the cards score 34.3. The difference between a single 9600 GT and 9800 GTX grows as we move from 1680x1050 to 1920x1200 but at 2560x1600 almost nothing is playable.

Unreal Tournament 3 is the most popular game engine on the market today so something we definitely want to investigate. It however is nowhere near as demanding as Crysis as we can see at 1680x1050 where it is more CPU bound and we in fact see a single 9600 GT top two 9600 GTs in SLI more than likely due to a fluke and but showing how much it is CPU bound at this resolution even at the maximum settings. Things start to grow at 1920x1200 as there is a 11fps difference between a 9600 GT and the 9800 GTX but at 2560x1600 the 9800 GTX finally shows it's might in SLI. Two 9600 GTs top a single 9800 at that resolution as well.

The Quake 4 engine is one of the best multi-threaded games out there as we demonstrated in our testing years ago. It isn't very CPU bound so here we show SLI outclassing their single card counterparts very easily.

We only ran through one resolution in Half-Life 2: Episode 2 as though it's seen enhancements it's still a more dated engine and is a breeze to run more often than not so we set everything maxed out, 16CSAA and 16XAF and ran through a tough demo in Half-Life 2: Episode 2. As with Quake Wars the game isn't CPU limited so it does very well with SLI with the 9800 GTX pulling out far ahead.

Finally we finish off with 3DMark. We'd thought we'd see some higher numbers than we were expecting but these are quite decent and it is a synthetic benchmark.

We didn't have time to overclock the cards but we'll do that in their individual reviews.