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Box

On the front of the XFX 9800 GX2's box, we have a machine nine. It looks almost like a bomb of sorts.

The back of the box boasts performance gainst of up to 50% above a 8800 Ultra. The benchmarks will have to see if this is accurate.

Bundle

The XFX 9800 GX2 comes with 2 DVI/VGA adapters, a driver CD, a full version of the excellent RTS Company of Heroes, a molex-to-PCIe adapter, a 'Do Not Disturb' placard, a manual, a quick installation guide, and a S/PDIF cable.

All in all, a complete bundle.

This would also be a good place to mention that this 9800 GX2 is protected by XFX's Double Lifetime Warranty, which lasts for the life of your card, and also covers a second owner, if you ever choose to sell it. Remember to register your XFX card within 30 days to be eligible for this warranty.

Overclocking

Using RivaTuner, we tried to find out what this 9800 GX2 was capable of, following that age-old adage that an extremely powerful video card is good, but an overclocked extremely powerful video card is even better.

Setting the fan to 100% we began our overclocking adventure.

The stock clocks for the XFX 9800GX2 are 600, 1500, 2000 (core, shader, memory, in MHz.) As it turned out, the XFX 9800 GX2 had a lot more to offer than we expected, in the overclocking department. After a bit of experimentation, we had success sustaining benchmarks at clock settings of 703 / 1786 / 2308 -- which wasn't all that bad at all. That's a roughly 16% overclock across the board. For comparison, our EAH3870X2 we tested overclocked around the 5% mark.

Two important things to note about this overclocking, however: first off, the fan is pretty loud at 100%, and you'd probably not want your video card this loud all the time; and second, while the video card never crashed, there was brief flashes of darkness every once in a while during Crysis, indicating these clock speeds were a bit close too the edge and might not be healthy for your card to sustain, with standard cooling methods.

Watching the benchmarks fly-by at these overclocked speeds was a pleasure. Let me tell you: overclocked by about 16%, this card was fast. 

Really, really, really fast.