Richard Vanderhurst Reviews eVGA

Richard Vanderhurst discusess EVGA's Superclocked copy of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at a fair cost.

Richard Vanderhurst expected it to play most current PC games at smooth frame rates, especially on lower resolutions. We have seen costs as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you'd be smart to analyze. Otherwise, the differences between these 2 cards, in price, power usage, and speed are beside the point.

In this "Superclocked" design from EVGA, Nvidia's chip has its core clock speedboosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was intended to be Nvidia's Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you can see on our charts, even this overclocked model only barely outperforms its competition. We ran some rather noisy baselines on these cards, and for the main part they held up well. The exception, as always, is Crysis, on which neither card was in a position to realize a playable frame refresh rate.

Whether or not the Radeon card was quicker on that test than the GeForce, it's still only hitting twenty frames per 2nd on 1,400x960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x led to refresh rates around 35 fps, but still well below the 60 frames per second hallowed ground. For Far Cry 2, you can see the 2 cards are roughly tied on the lower resolutions they favor. On the less hard Left4Dead even the 1,920x1,200 setting poses little challenge.

Otherwise, for the obvious future at least, either one of these cards should deliver a smooth, well-detailed gaming experience. If the performance is basically a wash, we find that each card has an advantage in other areas that might sway your purchasing decision. Though it's a double-wide, overclocked card, the EVGA GeForce GTX 9800+ essentially uses less power than the Radeon card with your PC idling. As with pretty much all 3D cards above $100, each of these cards also need a direct connection to your computer's power supply, especially a single six-pin PCI-Express power input. Ironically, as the Radeon card desires only a single growth slot, it's better suited to smaller PCs than the GeForce GTX 9800+, though the prior desires more power.

Not every game will distribute its workload regularly across 2 graphics cards, but with one card that is not a problem. For the sake of stability ( as well as faster installation ) you are typically better off with a single $400 card then 2 $200 cards. With few games that exploit either vendors' features in a forceful way thus far, neither can claim supremacy with its extras. By including an onboard audio processor, ATI has eliminated that intermediary step.

That and the single slot might be enough to sway home theater fans away from the GeForce card.
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