Two Overclocked 9800 GTX Cards

April 15, 2008 – 5:22 AM

By our count, Nvidia and its add-in board partners offer no less than five designs based around the company’s G92 GPU: the 8800 GS, 8800 GT, 8800 GTS 512MB, 9800 GX2, and 9800 GTX—and that’s not even counting memory variants. That’s a lot of seemingly different products based on the same chip.

Of course, there are substantive differences. The 8800 GTX 512MB, 9800 GX2, and 9800 GTX all have more shader units (128) and ROPs (16) than the 8800 GT, which in turn, has 112 shader units to the 8800 GS’s 96. Still, they’re all built on the same chip—the lower end cards simply have some functional units disabled.

Our ET analyst Jason Cross recently examined an XFX GeForce 9800 GTX, and found performance to be only marginally better than an 8800 GTS 512MB. There are a couple of new features, including support for hybrid SLI and 3-way SLI. But despite requiring two power connectors in a 10.5-inch long card, the performance differences were minor.

But what if you took the 9800 GTX design—which can be considered an overclocked 8800 GTS 512MB card—and overclocked it? Today, we’ll examine two such cards: The PNY 9800 GTX OC and BFG’s top end 9800 GTX OCX.

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