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NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ The plus means better!
Date: 2008-06-23 | Author: Gregg Gonsowski
Company: NVIDIA
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INTRODUCTION
A funny thing happened the other day. We at Bjorn3D had just finished covering the launch of the GTX 200 GPUs and were turning our attention to AMD's launch of its new GPUs when NVIDIA called us. They told us they had upgraded the 9800 GTX with faster clocks and a smaller core. They were calling it the 9800 GTX+ and it was poised to take on the competition's newest GPU, the ATI 4850. They were going to send us a pair of these new cards and wanted to have the article go live on the 25th, the original launch day of the 4850. That's when it dawned on us, ATI is back and they had NVIDIA shaking in their GPUs! Just a couple short days later we get news that AMD found out what NVIDIA was up to and pushed up the launch of the 4850 six days ahead of schedule. When NVIDIA got wind of this they lifted their embargo on the 9800 GTX+. Ahhhh, isn't competition great!
Exciting plot lines and ethically dubious marketing aside, we at Bjorn3D can't remember a time when the mid-range market was this exciting! Oh wait, it was 8-months ago when the 8800 GT showed up though without any real competition. Regardless of which side of the fence you are on it, is a great day for PC gaming everywhere. Not to mention the expansion of GPU computing into other areas like video transcoding and super-computing. Without further ado I present to you the newest card in NVIDIA's arsenal in the on-going battle for the mid-range market, the 9800 GTX+. The plus means better!
SPECIFICATIONS
To help highlight some of the physical changes that took place with this new card we compiled this short list of specs.
| NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ GPU | |||
| NVIDIA 9800 GTX+ | NVIDIA 9800 GTX | ATi 4850 | |
| Fabrication Process | 55nm | 65nm | 55nm |
| Transistor Count | 754m | 754m | 965m |
| Core Clock Rate | 740 MHz | 675 MHz | 625 MHz |
| SP Clock Rate | 1,836 MHz | 1,675 MHz | - |
| Streaming Processors | 128 | 128 | 800 |
| Memory Type | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 |
| Memory Clock | 1,100 MHz (2,200 MHz) |
1,100 MHz (2,200 MHz) |
1000 MHz (2,000 MHz) |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 70.4 GB/s | 70.4 GB/s | 64.0 GB/s |
| Memory Size | 512 MB | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| ROPs | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Texture Filtering Units | 64 | 64 | 40 |
| Texture Filtering Rate | 47.4 GigaTexels/sec | 43.2 GigaTexels/sec | 25.0 GigaTexels/sec |
| RAMDACs | 400 MHz | 400 MHz | 400 MHz |
| Bus Type | PCI-E 2.0 | PCI-E 2.0 | PCI-E 2.0 |
| Power Connectors | 2 x 6-pin | 2 x 6-pin | 1 x 6-pin |
The 9800 GTX+ is basically the same card as the 9800 GTX but with a smaller core size and higher core clocks. The memory remains the same speed as before as does the rest of the card. It will be interesting to see how much power this card uses with its smaller manufacturing process.
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