Author: Ben Sun · 11-28-2008
The recent flurry of launches of video cards has really redefined what the industry is like on the market especially with the holiday season just starting. ATI and NVIDIA have completed their holiday lineups of video cards with numerous cards available across the myriad price spectrum. The high-end of the video card market is dominated by the GeForce GTX 280 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards at over $400, but what about the mid-range?
NVIDIA's answer to the mid-range of the video card spectrum surfaced in the form of the GeForce 9800GT and GeForce 9800GTX. While the GeForce 9800GT is basically a rebranded GeForce 8800GT, with higher clock speeds the 9800GTX is an 8800GTX with HybridPower. The 9800GT retails in stores online for the reasonable price of $110 online with the 9800GTX+ being online for about $169. The price difference is large enough to call them two different price ranges. ASUS manufactures computer equipment like motherboards and video cards so naturally, they have a 9800GT card. Today's review is on the ASUS EN9800GT HybridPower video card.
The specifications of the GeForce 9800GT might seem familiar to anyone with an NVIDIA video card of the last year or so. That is because the chip is based upon the same G92 chip that the GeForce 8800GT was built upon with the addition of a few non-graphic features. The main new features of the GeForce 9800GT are HybridPower, HDMI Output and PureVideo HD support that is found on the 9xxx cards not found on the 8xxx cards.
The 9800GT has 112 Stream Processors, which is exactly the same as the first 8800GT cards With a clock speed of 600MHz for the core this means the card has a fill rate of 33.6Gigatexels/second. In fact the clock speeds of the Core Memory and Shader speeds are exactly the same as the 8800GT cards. The memory clock is 1800MHz (900MHz GDDR3) which gives a memory bandwidth of 57.6GB/second.
HybridPower is NVIDIA's nomenclature for their power saving technology that when used in combination with a NVIDIA motherboard can save power. ASUS in fact uses HybridPower on the name of their card, meaning that it is supported. What HybridPower does is turn off the discrete graphics card ala the 9800GT card when 2D mode is enabled. Only motherboards with NVIDIA integrated 8200 or 9300/9400 graphics support this feature. As the maximum power of a graphics card can exceed 226W (GTX 280), this is a great way of saving energy.
PureVideo HD is the latest incarnation of PureVideo released by NVIDIA. It is both hardware and a software decoder/encoder. PureVideo HD adds Dynamic Contrast Enhancement and Dual HD Streaming capability to the engine. It was first introduced with the 9600GT cards last year. PureVideo HD allows for the changing of the contrast in a picture on the fly. The other feature allows the user to play back two High Definition streams simultaneously, meaning that the video card can play back both the cast commentary and the main movie at the same time.
One of NVIDIA's big pushes recently has been their push of CUDA and PhysX technologies. CUDA allows the graphics card to operate as a computer with the 9800GT having 112 Stream Processors that can work either as a Compute processor or as a graphics Processor. NVIDIA cards based upon 8xxx series or 9xxx series chips can run PhysX games like Unreal Tournament 3, Warmonger and the recently announced Mirror's Edge which will support PhysX effects to good effect.
source : www.motherboards.org
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