GeForce 9800 GX2: Nvidia's new double-header

 

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Posted on 18 Mar 2008 at 13:07

Nvidia has officially unveiled the latest card in its new GeForce 9000 series - the 9800 GX2.

As the name suggests, it's a dual-GPU card in the same mould as AMD's HD 3870 X2, though unlike the AMD card it uses two physical printed circuit boards (PCBs), rather than two chips mounted on a single board.

Although the GX2 is the latest of Nvidia's "next generation" cards, it's based on the 65nm G92 core already seen in the 8800 GT. Internal speeds will be largely the same too, with a 600MHz core and a 1.5GHz shader clock. The memory clock has, however, been boosted to 2GHz, a step up from the 1.4GHz and 1.8GHz speeds available from the 8800 GT.

These clock rates are slightly lower than the core and shader speeds of the already-released 9600 GT, which come in at 650MHz and 1.625GHz respectively.

Where the GX2 comes into its own is parallel processing power: its 256 stream processors, divided between two GPUs, represent the highest shader count of any Nvidia card to date. This should let the GX2 deliver performance far in excess of the 112-shader 8800 GT or the 64-shader 9600 GT.

It's also rumoured the GX2 will support quad-SLI, though we suspect that, as with the HD 3870 X2, this will really mean you're still limited to two physical cards.

And while standard models are expected to come with a total of 1GB of graphics RAM (512MB per PCB), it's been suggested that Nvidia's partners might increase this to a full gigabyte on each PCB, providing an unprecedentedly huge frame buffer.

The downside is the price, expected to be decidedly on the high side: it was suggested at CeBIT that the European retail price would be €549, or around £420. If true, this would make the GX2 £150 more expensive than AMD's dual-GPU card, and not far off three times the price of an 8800 GT.

Can the GX2's performance justify this sort of cost? Watch this space for benchmark results and a full review.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith