Nvidia came out with the GeForce 9800 GTX series of cards recently and as usual with Nvidia's lineup now that they've been out for some time we start to see cards from other manufacturers that give it something of a twist. One of these cards is Foxconn's GeForce 9800 GTX OC740/2280 which we'll be looking at today.

Here are the specifications.

GPU： NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
Core： G92
CoreClock： 740MHz
Pixel Pipeline： 128 Stream Processors
Vertex Pipeline： 128 Stream Processors
RAMDACs： 400MHz
Memory Type： GDDR3
Memory Size： 512MB
Memory Clock： 2280MHz
Memory Interface： 256bit
Graphics Bus Technology： PCI Express 2.0
Cooler： Fansink
Connectors： Dual Dual-Link DVI + HDTV_Out
Special Features： PCI Express 2.0
NVIDIA® SLI™ Support
Dual Dual-Link DVI Support
HDTV Out Support

The card from the outside looks like a standard GeForce 9800 GTX reference video card with the shiny, Darth Vader's helmet-like shroud that covers the card and the standard two DVI-outputs, golden fingers, and two PCI-Express connectors. However on the inside there are some differences, the most major one being that the card is overclocked out of the box. The GPU is clocked 55MHz more than the standard clock of 685MHz and the RAM is up to 2280MHz from 2200MHz. This is a nice bonus from Foxconn of not having to work with overclocking utilities or voiding your warranty but giving you a speed boost over the normal default speed. Also the Foxconn card features Japanese solid state capacitors which extend the lifespan over normal capacitors and also run cooler which is a great bonus. More information can be found at Foxconn's website.

The hardware bundle is fairly standard including two PCI-E molex power adapters, two DVI-to-VGA adapters, and an HDTV dongle. The software bundle features DriveClone software and Virtual Drive software in addition to of course drivers and a manual.

The core is based off the G94 series and is built on a 65nm manufacturing process which lowers heat and reduces cost significantly. It also features onboard HD decoding of such codecs as H.264 to lower CPU usage, full DirectX10 support (though no DX 10.1)