Conclusion:

What can we say but at last Nvidia has given us the GeForce 9800 GTX and it appears to be the fastest single GPU on the market and keeps Nvidia in the driver's seat when it comes to the performance crown. But while the the GeForce 8800 GTX launched around $600 when it was released the GeForce 9800 GTX is launched for $330. This is partly due to a strengthened AMD and also because the 9800 GTX isn't as earth shattering as the GeForce 8800 GTX was. This isn't a bad thing though, it is faster and it is a much better value than it's predecessor. Compared to the GeForce 9600 GT though things are quite often in the titles closer than they are farther apart. The 9800 GTX is never behind but it seems Crysis is definitely CPU bound still at this part. Once we get to older titles the 9800 GTX starts flying and both cards do excellent in SLI. The 9800 GTX is a very reasonable card at $330 but with the 8800 GT now sub-$200 and the 9600 GT available after rebate for under $150 one could put together two 9600 GT cards for less than the cost of a single 9800 GTX and have a faster setup. However, that also requires you be stuck to an Nvidia chipset and motherboard which supports SLI. Both Foxconn and Asus have very good boards which do just that. That said we're just at the beginning of DX10 and those extra stream processors on the 9800 GTX could start to come in handy down the line. And of course if you don't want to toil with SLI or an SLI motherboard the GeForce 9800 GTX is the fastest single GPU card on the market.

As far as Asus and Foxconn's 9800 GTX goes so far we're more than happy with both of their cards and they've both been manufacturers we've more than been able to trust. We're more curious how the Foxconn performs on it's own as it is overclocked out of the box by a hefty margin but that will have to wait a few days to run more tests and we also plan to try and overclock the Asus and see how much performance we can push. These are certainly interesting times as it seems every week something a new major card or CPU is launched and the 9800 GTX is a big part of that, if not what the 8800 GTX was we'll see if Nvidia can repeat that success again.

Score: 97%