XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB GDDR3 Video Card Review

[skier]

[I'm also thinking it might be a better investment to wait a year and just buy a card upgrade then since my $240 will get me much further then (By that time OpenGL 3.0 specs should finally get finalized, and cards should switch to DX10.1 -which is a marketing gimmick but I'm still afraid the game makers will suddenly drop support for DX10.0, then there is the fact that series 9 is just a refresh of the G92 chip, besides neither SLI nor Crossfire is using the cards' full potential yet and Crossfire seems to be doing better).

well, there is good reason to believe that nvidia will transfer to 10.1, but most resources believe they will go straight to 11(.x, it could be like 9.0,b & c or it could be like 10)

and you are very right, the GX2 for example is two G92 cores, and the lower models are slight varitions with that(G94, G96 etc.)some people have complained that the 3870X2 is "just two RV670 cores slapped together and calling it R680", but i guess they never realized GX2 is the same core strategy, at least ATI made major adjustments to their R600 core to make the 3K series(including, but not limited to, die shrink)

[Zertz]

at least ATI made major adjustments to their R600 core to make the 3K series(including, but not limited to, die shrink)

G9x is die shrink as well!

The problem is that nVidia has G92 on both 8 and 9 series

[stopthekilling77]

yeah sorta blew their own horn a little early huh?

[skier]

The problem is that nVidia has G92 on both 8 and 9 series

i was kinda curious about that too,i bet they woulda put G96 or something if they had more time in R&D to play, but the 3870x2 was right up their ass in performance, and they certainly cant have that, so they slapped what already worked on there and called it good, who knows, mabie once they get the better cores out there, they will switch like G80-G92

[ibleet]

who knows, mabie once they get the better cores out there, they will switch like G80-G92

Yep, maybe the "G80-G92" thing worked good for their sales and they want to continue with that trend.

Although I do agree that ATI is keeping them on their toes.

[R3N3G4D3]

I'm a bit dissapointed with the way both SLI and Crossfire is being used. It's supposed to give a better gaming experience, but there are better and more efficient ways to use this excess processing power. I'm more curious to see SLI/Crossfire used to reproduce real 3D environments as opposed to alternating frame drawing like they do now. There has been numerous research done proving that by sending slightly different image angles to your left and right eye you can simulate a truly 3D image. With twice the processing power, what prevents game developers from doing just that? You would probably need a special monitor, however, with microlenses built in to send diffferent image to different angle (eye) (they already have such monitors, but I think they're custom-order only for now).

Btw ibleet, i tried overclocking my 8800GTS again just for laughs and somehow it's now stable at 741/1081 (tried 3dmark06 twice, 2 hours of UT 2007, and an hour of Crysis). I'm not sure what happened as I remember it was crashing at 730/stock on the day I got it (same PSU). The only thing that changed between then and now is that my CPU and memory were running at 2.4GHz/800 MHz and now at 3.0GHz/1000MHz, so clearly it's not that something else wasn't stable before. This is a rather pleasant surprise.

[ibleet]

Congrats on the new overclock. I was surprised when you said it wouldn't go that high.

[jonnyGURU]

Yes they are grounds, it's simply because the current draw is very high and the 2 extra grounds help stabilize the load, something like that. One of my teachers explained it and it really made sense anyways

Typically, that would be true. More conductors = less resistance and it also helps if there's more grounds (like when you do car audio, it's better to have a thicker gauge and/or shorter ground wire to the frame than a big hot wire to the battery). But when it comes to these graphics cards with 8-pin PCIe connectors the fact of the matter is the extra two pins on the graphics cards are a +12V sense and a ground. Essentially a signal lead. But nobody has "updated" their PSU's to include +12V sense on the PCIe. Heck, PCI-SIG hasn't even finalized the 300W PCIe specification draft! So what everyone is doing is just putting a ground to the signal lead to "fool" the graphics card into thinking there's a +12V sense present.

And sorry for bumping an old thread. Slow day and I was bored.

[Zertz]

Yes they are grounds, it's simply because the current draw is very high and the 2 extra grounds help stabilize the load, something like that. One of my teachers explained it and it really made sense anyways

Typically, that would be true. More conductors = less resistance and it also helps if there's more grounds (like when you do car audio, it's better to have a thicker gauge and/or shorter ground wire to the frame than a big hot wire to the battery). But when it comes to these graphics cards with 8-pin PCIe connectors the fact of the matter is the extra two pins on the graphics cards are a +12V sense and a ground. Essentially a signal lead. But nobody has "updated" their PSU's to include +12V sense on the PCIe. Heck, PCI-SIG hasn't even finalized the 300W PCIe specification draft! So what everyone is doing is just putting a ground to the signal lead to "fool" the graphics card into thinking there's a +12V sense present.

And sorry for bumping an old thread. Slow day and I was bored.

Interesting! Thanks for sharing the info!