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Power Usage

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.

The 9800GTX uses appreciably less power than the 8800 GTX. The optimization of the unified shader architecture has come a far way in the the last two years. Compared to the 8800GT, the XFX 9800GTX requires a reasonable amount of power -- about where you'd expect to be. NVIDIA recommends a 450W power supply or greater for the 9800GTX, while XFX recommends a 620W power supply or greater. 620W seems to a bit conservative -- a 500W or greater should do the trick, I would think. However be wary if you have a cheaper 500W PSU, you might be starving your system of a steady supply of power.

Regardless of what PSU you have, you'll need two six-pin PCIe power connectors to use your card. The bundle does come with one molex-to-PCIe adapter though, so if your PSU only has one PCIe connector, you should be fine.

Overclocking

After numerous experiments, we had trouble overclocking this video card in Vista. This will probably not be a factor with later driver revisions, but for now, it seems that overclockers are best suited to experiment using Windows XP.

We had high hopes for overclocking the XFX 9800 GTX, thanks primarily to the effective cooler it utilizes. These high hopes were met in our overclocking expeditions. While the stock clocks for this card are 675 / 1688 / 2200 (core / shader / memory), after setting the fan run at a 100% using RivaTuner, we were very happy with how far we could push the XFX 9800 GTX. We had no stability problems running the card at a 819 / 2050 / 2520 setting, which is very impressive, most especially in regards to that shader clock overclock.

It is possible that this card can be pushed even further, and we will be investigating this.

XFX definitely has ample opportunity to release a 'XXX' version of this card. With a volt mod or extravagant cooling measures, it'll be interesting to see how this video card can be pushed.