Preview : GIGABYTE GV-N98TZL-1GH Graphics Card

Nvidia's 9 series graphics cards have always been great performers. The
latest offering, the 9800GT is no different. It comes with a whopping 1 GB of
GDDR3 memory and a 256-bit memory interface. It has a single slot design with
dual link DVI ports. It has to be connected via a 6 pin power connector, so make
sure your power supply has one. To keep the temperature at bay, the card comes
equipped with a copper heat sink and a Zalman fan. The cooling system of the
card is absolutely great and the highest temperature that we noted during
benchmark tests was 45 degrees Celsius. We tested the card using an AMD 64 X2
3800 processor running at 2 GHz, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, on an MSI K9N2 Diamond
motherboard. We ran our standard benchmarks on Windows XP SP3 with GeForce
181.22 drivers. In 3D Mark 06 it got an overall score of 7606 3D Marks, whereas
in PC Mark 05 it got an overall score of 5029 and 11032 for graphics
performance. The card gave us a score of 58.7 FPS in Unreal Tournament 3 with
1280 x 1024 resolution. In Left4dead, the card gave 50.46 FPS with maximum
details on 1280 x 1024 resolution. The OpenGL Fur rendering benchmark gave us an
average of 40 FPS. All these scores prove this is one capable graphics card that
you can use to play all the existing game titles with medium to full details on
high resolution. The only issue is its price, and at 3-4k less, it would have
given good value for money. An alternative that comes to mind straightaway is
Gecube 4850, which performs way better and is also priced low.

Bottom Line: A decent performer but the extra cooling does not justify
its price.