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To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we ran a demanding part of 3DMark06.

If you are going to be investing in a high-end card such as a 9800 GTX, you are going to not want to skimp on your power supply. If you have a quality 500W PSU -- and not an excessive amount of hard drives and other components -- you should be okay. With a 9800 GTX SLI setup, you are going to want something around the 680W mark, or higher.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that the Palit 9800 GTX is a one of the fastest cards you could get today. In fact, with this amount of GPU power, one problem you may have is finding a game that will give your video card any sort of challenge to run! Retailing for around $330 USD currently, the Palit 9800 GTX fits in nicely at the upper-end of segment of NVIDIA's current line-up. In an SLI configuration, the 9800 GTX -- as expected -- dominates the benchmarks. However, in both single and dual card configurations, the 9800 GTX often only maintains a small performance lead over much of the competition.

Price-saavy consumers would probably notice that the Palit 9600 GT Sonic in SLI put in some solid results in our benchmarks, often doing much better than you would expect from a card with 64 stream processers. With prices as low as they are for standard-clocked 9600 GT's (even sometimes dropping around the $120 mark), a user-overclocked 9600 GT SLI setup might be a new sweet spot.  Although, for those who are not watching their wallets as closely, if you after the top levels of performance, a reasonably overclocked Palit 9800 GTX running in SLI would be almost impossible to beat.

While the Palit 9800 GTX will satsified all of our demands for performance, it was perhaps lacking just a little that would seperate it from the rest of the pack. When you look at the price gap between the 9800 GTX and the rest of the NVIDIA line-up, and to a lesser extent ATI's HD3870, many gamers would probably hope that the 9800 GTX would absolutely trounce the competition, instead of merely just beating it. Another bone to pick with the Palit 9800 GTX was the lack of adapters in the bundle. While a pretty good offering from Palit, with so many intruiging options out there, the Palit 9800 GTX does not seem to offer anything notably more than any of the other 9800 GTX cards on the market today.  And while it's hard to argue with top-of-the-chart performance, with the price of mid-range cards such as 8800 GT's and 9600 GT's (such as the Palit 9600 GT Sonic, which did so well in our tests), it becomes difficult to justify going the distance and getting this 9800 GTX, because for those extra dollars, in the end, the less-expensive challengers will offer fairly similar gaming experiences. But for those of you who have a top-end display, or buy video cards only every 4 or 5 years, the Palit 9800 GTX look a bit more enticing.