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Impressions

The XFX 9800GTX is a very large card -- not as monstrous as the 9800GX2 or HD3870X2, but almost as big -- and it'll hang off the end of your motherboard, and take up every millimeter of it's double-slot width. Compared to a 8800 GTX, both PCBs are of the same length, but the cooler on the 9800GTX stretches even further along than its predecessors. In regards to the cooler, the one on the XFX 9800 GTX is from the standard, reference design -- XFX have not changed it in anyway. The cooler has an appearance that is strongly reminiscent of the one found on the 8800 GTS 512MB cards: it has the same fan (set at the same angle), and the same array of heat fins. For all purposes, it is pretty much the same cooling design -- the only difference being that the is slightly extended, to accommodate the 9800GTX's stretched PCB. Again similar to the 8800 GTS 512MB, when in normal operation, the 9800 GTX fan is quite quiet, and can only really be heard if it is manually set to run near its maximum speed.

From my experiences with the 8800 GTS 512MB, this cooler design seems fairly solid to me: it both maximizes heatsink coverage and pushes warmed exhaust air out of the rear of your case. The fan is also robust enough (powerful enough) that it should allow for reasonable overclocking headroom, if fully engaged.

Following in the path of the HD3870X2 and 9800GX2, the 9800GTX makes use of LEDs. There is one present on the end of the card, which can assist in basic troubleshooting. Beside the LED, on the card's bracket, you have your standard pair of dual-link, HDCP-enabled DVI-I output ports, and a HDMI output.

One of the reasons that the XFX 9800 GTX is longer than the 8800 GT or 8800 GTS 512MB is pictured above: this high-end card has two SLI connectors. With two SLI connectors, if you feel so inclined, you could run up to three 9800 GTX cards at a time with NVIDIA's 3-way SLI. That's right: three 9800GTX cards can run in SLI. Of course, even if you already have a motherboard with the requisite amount of PCIe slots you'd probably do not want to drop over $1000 on three cards right now, this feature is nonetheless nice to have, as someday far down the road 3 9800GTX cards may be much more affordable.

One new connector that you might not be familiar with is the SPDIF audio connector, that is on the top of the 9800 GTX. This was also present on the 9800GX2. With the SPDIF cable included in the bundle, if feel so inclined, you can connect your 9800GTX directly to your sound card, so that high-quality passes through the video card, to be transmitted via the HDMI output.

Specifications

Below is a fantastic and handy chart, displaying relevant specifications on our XFX 9800 GTX in comparison with some familiar faces from the world of GPUs.

As you might surmise from the numbers, the 9800GTX does seem to be closely related to the 8800GTS 512MB -- you could see it as a logical, more powerful extrapolation of this previous product. Well I haven't tested the card yet, these numbers suggest that an overclocked 8800GTS 512MB would offer fairly similar performance to a 9800 GTX -- but only testing will be able to confirm this.

While NVIDIA GPU engineers do not often solicit advice from Neoseeker regarding video card design, if they did, I would suggest to them boosting the memory capacity of the 9800 GTX to 1GB. Although the extra memory would not substantially increase regular performance, it would help at higher resolutions (and higher AA settings) and would be make for a nice distinction between the 8800 GTS 512MB, and would help SLI setups. Alas, the NVIDIA engineers have not yet called. Perhaps some future editions of the 9800GTX will have 1GB.

Size comparison between the XFX 9800 GTX and the XFX 8800 GTS 512MB.

Further Specifications

Although they are hard to make out, the 9800 GTX has in the neighborhood of 754 million transistors. (This is a pretty astounding number if you think about it for a moment.) In a calculated  effort to help out in demanding games such as Crysis, the 9800GTX has 64 texturing processors, and sixteen render back-end units (ROPS), capable of creating images at a maximum resolution of 2560x1600.

There are two more features of the 9800GTX that are particularly worth mentioning. The first is HybridPower. If your motherboard supports this, HybridPower will keep the your 9800GTX in stand-by mode, only bringing it to full power when required by your games and applications. The second is the PureVideo2 engine. With this, the 9800GTX has an easy time decoding HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, keeping the processing burden off of your CPU's shoulders.