NVIDIA Launches 790i Chipset & 9800 GX2 Graphics Card

NVIDIA kicked off two brand-new releases today, both of which we’ll take our own look at in the near-future. The 790i chipset is a variant of their 780i offering, but is tweaked to cater to the enthusiast in all regards. It’s the first NVIDIA chipset to offer support for 1600FSB processors and also DDR3-2000 memory. Now that’s high-end.

Also launched in the 9800 GX2, NVIDIA’s “Dual-GPU” solution on a single card. Although not a truly new architecture, the GX2 essentially throws two 8800GTS 512 cards into a single GPU, and is priced right around that idea, at $600.

Our friends at HotHardware have taken a look at both of the new products and can’t help but be left very impressed. The 790i board offers incredible performance and a great feature-set, while the 9800 GX2 outperforms the HD 3870 X2 by a rather sizable margin. Though the 9800 GX2 costs $150 more than the SRP for the HD 3870 X2, it’s looking like it’s a worthy investment if you want the absolutely best card available on the market.

As for the GeForce 9800 GX2, it is clearly the most powerful single graphics adapter currently available. In all of our in-game benchmarks, the GeForce 9800 GX2 outpaced every other single graphics card configuration including the Radeon HD 3870 X2. It was only in 3DMark06 that the Radeon had an advantage, but that didn’t translate into any benchmark wins with actual games at the high resolutions we tested.

Source: HotHardware