The Card

Out of the box, the first thing that you notice is of course the Zalman cooler sitting straight in the middle of the card. As far as other features go, there isn't too much out of the ordinary with it looking like most mid-range NVIDIA graphics cards.

Looking around the card, we find the characteristics of most mid-range cards. Towards the back of the card we have a single PCI Express power connector.

Moving across the top of the card, we find a single SLI connector. Next to that we also have the port for the loop back cable so that you can get sound through the HDMI adapter, but it seems GIGABYTE has chosen not to include this.

The I/O department is pretty standard with two Dual Link DVI connectors and a single TV-Out port. While the card does take up two slots, the I/O side of things is only a single bracket.

Specifications

Out of the box, the 9800 GT comes with 512MB of GDDR3 clocked at 1800MHz DDR on a 256-bit bus. The core comes clocked in at 600MHz while the shader clock comes in at 1500MHz. We have a PCI-E 2.0 interface, 112 processor cores, DirectX 10 support and OpenGL 2.1.

While initially the core is based on 65nm tech, NVIDIA has stated that later down the track they will be moving to 55nm which should help drop temps and also give us the ability to get a few more MHz out of the card. Apart from this, we see other exclusive NVIDIA technology like PhysX and CUDA present to help make it stand out against the competition. The card also incorporates Hybrid Power for people with a HP enabled monitor.