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Now onto the challenger: the N9800 GT, from MSI.

 The 8800 GT was arguably the most surprising card to come from NVIDIA in the last year. It certainly turned things upside down when it came out, offering upper-spectrum performance for a mid-range price. It is amazing to think how much the video card landscape has changed in the last year -- a good part of this change is due to the release of the 8800 GT.

And in this ring, we have...

Though a successful product, for NVIDIA, the 8800GT seemed almost like a double-edged sword: for starters, upon release, it outperformed some NVIDIA's own cards that were selling for much more, like the 8800GTS 640MB. If hindsight was 20/20 perhaps NVIDIA would have thought it better to release the 8800GT initially as the 9800GT -- because since the 8800GT's release, I would argue that there has been a great deal of confusion over the naming scheme from cards following ever since. I've been on countless forums trying to explain to people how the 8800GTS 512MB is faster than the 8800GTS 640MB. Things got confusing.

But enough historical perspective -- let's take a look at the N9800GT from MSI.

This shader-overclocked N9800 doesn't seem to have much in common with a standard 8800GT as far as appearances go. The first thing that might throw people off is the red PCB -- not all that common on a NVIDIA card.

Opposed to the standard 9800GT, the N9800GT had a double-slot width custom cooler on it. Similar to the design shared with many recent cards from Palit, the N9800GT has four copper heat pipes to help cool the GPU. The pipes connected across a length of aluminum cooling fins. Cooling these fins is a large fan. On top of the cooler we have a plastic cover with the MSI stickers -- the cover doesn't appear to really focus air in any particular way to improve cooling; those with a large side-fan in their computer case might want to take this cover off, as it might improve cooling potential.

All in all this cooler looks like it means business, and should have no problem sustaining the N9800 GT's out-of-the-box overclock. It should be noted however that the card's 512MB's of Samsung K4J52324QE GDDR3 memory is not covered by any part of the heatsink. Not at all unusual -- but this might make overclocking the card's memory a bit more fun.  

Under that cooler we have the G92 GPU -- actually, hold on a second. Even though the core of the 8800GT and 9800GT are in many cases the same, in this case, the N9800GT uses the die-shrink revision, G92b 55nm. The G92b will likely require less power than the G92. But as for performance, there should not be much difference between a the G92 and G92b -- although it does seem likely that the G92b revision stands a good chance of being a better overclocker than the plain-Jane G92. For whatever reason, various boxes containing 9800GT's do not say whether the core inside is a G92 or G92b, for better, or for worse.  

The G92b has 754 million transistors -- about 200 million less than the HD 4830, but we won't hold this against the card until we see the benchmarks.

The MSI N9800GT has a has 125MHz overclock to its shader clock. Not enough to make a remarkable difference -- but hey, faster than a standard 9800GT nonetheless.

Unlike the HD 4830, the N9800 GT only officially supports DirectX 10.0 -- so far though, in real world gaming terms, that extra .1 hasn't really made much of a difference. Only a handful of games support DX 10.1, and the differences between the the two versions isn't all that huge.

The MSI N9800GT also has support for Hybrid Power, PCI Express 2.0, SLI (only two cards can be linked), PhysX and PureVideo 2.0 technology.