| Foxconn GeForce 9800 GTX OC 740/2280 |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | |||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 20 May 2008 07:15 | |||||||||||||||||||
Here are the specifications. GPU： NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
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)
Here is our current test system.
Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.4. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.
As far as single GPU solutions go the Asus 9800 GTX leads the pack at 26.3fps at 1920x1200 in Crysis on high with DX10. In SLI this this bumps up to 34.3 fps.
Unreal Tournament 3 gives some excellent results for the 9800 GTX besting two 9600 GT cards until one gets to 2560x1600 resolution.
Quake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market and as always with Open GL games it favors Nvidia heavily. SLI combination of 9800 GTX is definitely unbeatable in Quake Wars.
Episode 2 isn't very demanding at even HD resolutions so we only tested at 2560x1600. 9800 GTX again comes out on top and hits 81.6FPS in SLI.
3DMark is a synthetic benchmark but very popular to see hardware potential. Things are more even across the board here.
Overclocking we were able to get a nice boost to 770MHz for the core and 1.29GHz for the memory.
Conclusion: Foxconn have done a good job with the GeForce 9800 GTX and it's nice to start seeing overclocked versions of the card coming out of the woodwork. The Japanese solid state capacitors are a good way to improve lifespan and also hopefully give overclocking a boost although the software bundle is fairly weak. More odd though is that it was impossible to find a Foxconn 9800 GTX graphics card at any North American retailers, unfortunately. It wasn't that long ago that we saw quite a few, we're not sure if this shifts a change in direction for the company but we'll keep you informed on what is happening in their graphics card business. Score: 95%
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