Palit GeForce 9800 GTX

The performance of the PALiT 9800GTX was excellent compared to the rest of the midrange GPU pack it was pitted against. The new price point of the 9800GTX places it at $199.99 USD, an excellent value at that price point. True faster, newer NVIDIA flavors exist, but not in that price range. Keep in mind the newer cards in NVIDIA’s repertoire consist mainly of more refreshes of the G92 GPU, and don’t really offer much in technical advancements. This makes the 9800GTX a very viable upgrade option to someone using on the older GPU’s listed in the comparison charts.

The 9800GTX is the fastest single chip video card I’ve ever tested. Having said all the positives on the 9800GTX, the 9800GTX is not much of an upgrade over the 8800GTS 512MB that was released last year and is in fact just an overclocked version of that card with more power requirement and a higher price. It is rather disappointing from a technical point of view to see NVIDIA stuck in a rut. It has been over two years since the release of the 8800GTX and the 9800GTX just doesn’t live up to the GTX moniker as something special.

The 9800GTX is the fastest single chip video card I’ve ever tested. Having said all the positives on the 9800GTX, the 9800GTX is not much of an upgrade over the 8800GTS 512MB that was released last year and is in fact just an overclocked version of that card with more power requirement and a higher price. It is rather disappointing from a technical point of view to see NVIDIA stuck in a rut.

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.

Of course you will have the GeForce 9 bragging rights when choosing this product, which offers almost only slightly better performance compared to the GeForce 8 products.If you are an SLI fanatic, this card can also be used in triple SLI, which the GeForce 8 cards can't. Another unique feature is the support for HybridPower which completely shuts off your graphics card and renders on the integrated NVIDIA graphics of your motherboard (if you have such a motheboard). This helps to save a considerable amount of power.