XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI Versus ATI CrossFireX

[Apoptosis]

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI Versus ATI CrossFireX

Last week, we got a chance to look at the XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card and found that it was a very powerful card for gaming. At the conclusion of that article we stated that we couldn't show Quad-SLI numbers as NVIDIA had them under NDA. The gag order has finally lifted, so we can share with you our thoughts on Quad-SLI with a pair of XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards!

NVIDIA has done a great job with Quad-SLI and with some driver improvements it should only get better. The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards running in a quad-SLI showed increased performance in every application we tested versus a single GeForce 9800 GX2, which is something that can not be said about the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 as they had some driver issues on Tomb Raider: Anniversary. We almost didn't include Tomb Raider: Anniversary in our testing, but our two store-bought DVD versions of Bioshock say they have been installed too many times, so this game was a last minute addition.

Article Title: XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/681/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $589 per XFX GeForce 9800 GX2

[martini161]

nice informative review. and about that "idiotic DRM they use" IMO all DRMs are idiotic

[Apoptosis]

I've been fighting with them for days to get my serials for Bioshock unlocked... I e-mail them and tell them I am over on my activations and to increase the limit for my serial numbers and they respond with this:

Hello.

Thank you for your email. We are sorry to hear that you are having problems activating your game. Could you also please supply us with your Serial and Unlock Request Code?

What you can also do is visit our new website http://www.bioshockunlock.com/ to generate an unlock code yourself.


Best regards,

SecuROM Support Team
SecuROM on the web: http://www.securom.com
or via e-mail: [email protected]

Funny when I go to that site and try to unlock it I get this...

It appears that you have exceeded your BioShock activation limits.
Please contact support[at]securom.com to have your activation limit increased.

Now I'm waiting another 48 hours to hear back on what to do next.

[DMB2000uk]

DRM sucks completely. If it were mine, it'd be enough to make me want to crack the game to let me play.

The Nvidia setup in black just looks more kick ass than ATI's red theme.

Dan

[martini161]

i beg to differ. black is overplayed

[Flanno]

Did you guys use the driver that was posted today by Nvidia ? Same revision number *174.53*, that was released on the 18th, but they sneakily updated it with quad sli support and changed the date to the 25th ? (Incidentally UK one is still showing as the 18th March with no quad support mentioned)

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_174.53.html

# Added support for GeForce 9800 GX2 , including Quad SLI Technology.
# Added new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 9800 GTX:
* Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
* Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
* Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration*
* Microsoft Vista Aero display mode compatibility for Blu-ray & HD DVD playback*

I have noticed HardOCP when running real world benches (not canned) said that quad was seriously lacking with some very poor minimum framerates. They blamed this on the lack of a 384bit bus and relatively low amount of memory (*512 compared to the 8800GTX 768meg). Anyone care to comment ? I hope they used the non quad drivers.

"Except for Crysis, GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI provides no real gameplay advantages and quite frankly we do not see Quad SLI benefitting much else right now. And haven’t we all played through Crysis enough times by now? A single GeForce 9800 GX2 is able to accelerate “demanding” titles like the shader-intensive Jericho and the tremendously popular Call of Duty 4 quite well; adding another GX2 does not provide gaming improvements to justify the cost. The only game that does possibly call for Quad SLI is Crysis; and even then AA higher resolutions is still not a reality due to the 9800 GX2’s limited memory amount and bus width. "

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.h ... aHVzaWFzdA

[Apoptosis]

Did you guys use the driver that was posted today by Nvidia ? Same revision number *174.53*, that was released on the 18th, but they sneakily updated it with quad sli support and changed the date to the 25th ? (Incidentally UK one is still showing as the 18th March with no quad support mentioned)

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.53.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp64_174.53.html

# Added support for GeForce 9800 GX2 , including Quad SLI Technology.
# Added new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 9800 GTX:
* Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
* Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
* Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration*
* Microsoft Vista Aero display mode compatibility for Blu-ray & HD DVD playback*

I have noticed HardOCP when running real world benches (not canned) said that quad was seriously lacking with some very poor minimum framerates. They blamed this on the lack of a 384bit bus and relatively low amount of memory (*512 compared to the 8800GTX 768meg). Anyone care to comment ? I hope they used the non quad drivers.

"Except for Crysis, GeForce 9800 GX2 Quad SLI provides no real gameplay advantages and quite frankly we do not see Quad SLI benefitting much else right now. And haven’t we all played through Crysis enough times by now? A single GeForce 9800 GX2 is able to accelerate “demanding” titles like the shader-intensive Jericho and the tremendously popular Call of Duty 4 quite well; adding another GX2 does not provide gaming improvements to justify the cost. The only game that does possibly call for Quad SLI is Crysis; and even then AA higher resolutions is still not a reality due to the 9800 GX2’s limited memory amount and bus width. "

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.h ... aHVzaWFzdA

The very first 174.53 driver we got supported Quad-SLI... NVIDIA just didn't make the support public on the 18th as they had something in the works with some retailers or something like that. I'm sure they added quad-sli support to the sites (by just added it to the features), but I don't think they tucked in any last many features or performance adjustments or even changed the driver package for that matter. As for the low frame rates I did see this in CoH version 1.71 with AA enabled, but other titles were fine. I'm sure HardOCP used the Quad drivers as they know what is going on.

[Flanno]

Thanks for the info.

Do you honestly believe the 256bit bus and relatively low memory is going to cause games to run into problems at 1920+ with AA ?
That's my biggest concern, and the reason why I think a lot of people with 8800gtx sli configs are staying put.

[Apoptosis]

Well I told my conspiracy theory here on the forums a few weeks ago... Think about big brother and this for a second...

How do you push Multi-GPU platforms? Slow down your product line and improve scaling with multiple cards... hum...

This in turns forces people to buy SLI chipsets and more than one card, which increases volume and sales... How else does NVIDIA expect to make it against Intel and AMD?

Far off guess, but could this already be in the works? With the 9800 GTX said to be THE card for triple-SLI and the 9800GX2 leading the quad-sli charge it is something to at least think about.

[ibleet]

Well I told my conspiracy theory here on the forums a few weeks ago...

Well fooling the public is not a hard thing to do obviously. There isn't a game in existence that requires more than a single 8800GTS (G92) to run at high settings and yet people are still clamoring for SLI, crossfire, and dual GPU setups...GO FIGURE! I'm not falling into that trap...hell, I'm not even the least bit tempted...and why would I be? All so I can say I got this great score on a benchmark? Or "keeping up with the Jones'"? Or its a STATUS issue...LoL...wise up peeps... it actually is a conspriacy...one that many people embrace willingly it seems.

I don't know the future, but judging from the past, I would guess that there will always be a single card solution to every game.

[maj0r_pawnage]

there goes the crown ati?

[szefte]

What's the point in testing 9800 GX2 in 1920x1200?
I think your going out of my favorites for this review.

[DMB2000uk]

Someone's quick to judge.

The LR review teams 2560x1600 monitor belongs to Brian, and currently he is too busy with work, girlfriend etc to have time to review graphics cards (Don't know if you've ever contemplated, but to test the suite of benchmarks on just one card can easily take up the best part of a whole day (and that's if things go smoothly)).

So Nate has taken over. The best monitor LR has that isn't Brians is 1920x1200, so that's what the testing was done on.

I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the cash to just pick up a 30" 2560x1600 monitor like that.

Dan

PS. To counter the 'low' resolution of the monitor used, AA and AF has been turned up to stress the cards more. If both Quad card setups were consistently in the 100's of fps then I would agree in that it isn't good testing of the cards, but the fact is that in most of the benchmarks used only the Quad GX2's were above 100fps (and in most cases not by a lot).

[HONkUS]

That is absolutley filthy sick!

I was not expecting 4 gpu's to scale all that well, but holy jeebus there is almost perfect 4x scaling in quad SLi, well except for Crysis

[Apoptosis]

Why get a 30" monitor when a number of games have a tough time playing at 1920x1200?

[szefte]

Well, you could ask the same question about GX2: Who's got enough money for it. But still, I just can't think of anyone getting 2x 9800GX2 to play 1920x1200. I was thinking about getting GX2 because of Matrix TH2GO and that thing gives you 3840 x 1024. THAT is a reason to go GX2!

[martini161]

well then my friend you have waaaay to much money to spend. im still stuck with a 19 inch widescreen over here

[Apoptosis]

A new version of GPU-Z came out and I updated versions tonight... I updated the article with the new version, since it's now reading right.

GPU-Z v0.1.7 -


GPU-Z v0.1.8 -

[SergioRoadster]

Congratulations for another great review. Your tests are great to clear doubts about the stuff we want to set on our systems.

I have a question about the power sistem. In "the test system" page are the specs of the power supply correct?
A 620 watts psu can handle a pair of those big mean monsters hd3870x2 or 9800gx2?!

[Apoptosis]

Congratulations for another great review. Your tests are great to clear doubts about the stuff we want to set on our systems.

I have a question about the power sistem. In "the test system" page are the specs of the power supply correct?
A 620 watts psu can handle a pair of those big mean monsters hd3870x2 or 9800gx2?!

I was waiting on someone to see that, yes I used the Corsair HX620W power supply for testing and it did fine. I also used the Coolermaster ESA 1000W power supply to make sure the results were spot on and no difference was noted. Glad someone caught that!