Introduction

Yesterday NVIDIA launched their "new" GeForce 9800 GT Series. You wonder why the new is in quotation marks? This time NVIDIA really went with the easy way. The GeForce 9800 GT is the same card with the same specifications as the GeForce 8800 GT. With GeForce 9 you get a few added features though, which are Purevideo HD and support for Hybrid SLI and Hybrid Power, the latter two working only on supported motherboards with chipsets from NVIDIA.

At least Zotac had a little bit of creativity up their sleeves and created an Amp! Edition card which comes with a cool orange PCB and higher clocks than the NVIDIA reference design.

Packaging & Contents

Zotac's package design is a bit unconventional since it uses a vertical design, other than that the box is like any other box from Zotac. The front shows the product highlights with more detailed specs on the back and the sides.



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Manual + Driver CD + XIII Century Death or Glory full game
• DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter
• PCI-Express power adapter
• TV out cable
• SPDIF audio cable

The Card

The first you will notice when looking at the card is that it uses a bright orange colored PCB - just like Zotac's company color. Like the 8800 GT, the 9800 GT uses a single slot cooler too. Given that this is an overclocked product, a dual-slot cooler would have been fine as well.


The card has two DVI ports, basically the most common output configuration these days. In case you need an analog VGA port you can use the included DVI adapter. When using an HDMI adapter (also included), you will also have access to HDMI+HDCP+Audio, which allows easy setup of a media PC. For the HDMI audio feature you have to connect the included SPDIF cable from your on-board audio or sound card to the input on the graphics card.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

The cooler is the same single slot cooler that we already saw on the GeForce 8800 GT.


You may combine two GeForce 9800 GT cards to run in SLI for increased performance. Triple SLI configurations are not supported with this card. To the right of the SLI connector you can see the white connector for the SPDIF audio input for HDMI+Audio. I wonder if it is possible to pair the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 9800 GT in SLI. It should be possible technically since it's the same card anyway, NVIDIA's driver makers may have a different opinion though.


Power to the card is supplied via single 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.


The GDDR3 chips are made by Samsung and have the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. They are rated for 1000 MHz (1.0 ns cycle time).


As mentioned before, the graphics processor has remained unchanged. The G92 has been used on other products before like the GeForce 8800 GT, 9600 GT and 9800 GTX. The chip we see here is still made in 65 nm technology, but it is expected that NVIDIA will soon introduce a 55 nm version of the G92, using a B revision number. Our chip is revision A2.