Gizmodo: 9800

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 Reviewed (Verdict: Pwns Radeon HD 3870 X2, But...)

matt buchanan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:10:18 EDT

Nvidia's headlining GeForce 9 series card, the monstrous 9800 GX2, officially launched today. It pulls an old trick out of Nvidia's hat—melding two GPUs onto a single board—so you can actually go quad-SLI for a mere $1200. It completely crushes ATI's top-of-the-line dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2. But is two times the GPU necessarily two times the awesome?

It's running the same GPU series as the 9600 GT, 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512MB (not be confused w/ the regular 8800 GTS). Actually when you look closely at the number of shader and stream processors and their clock speeds, it turns out the 9800 GX2 is basically two slightly underclocked 8800 GTS 512MB GPUs strapped together, and this plays out in the virtually indistinguishable benchmarks too.

Here's the rub: The 9800 GX2 is over 600 smackers. You can run two 8800 GT cards in SLI at $200 a pop and get almost the exact same performance for $200 less. So the real conclusion is that the 8800 GT is still the best card out there for the money. [Hard OCP]

New NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 Has 2 Processors, 1GB Memory, Eats PS3 for Breakfast

Haroon Malik — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:54:35 EST

The Skinny: NVIDIA's GeForce 9800, launching in late Feb / early March, will be successor to the 8800 Ultra. With an estimated 30% performance increase over the aforementioned top end GPU, and apparent support for "Quad SLI," it is certainly no slacker.

The Catch: Expect the 9800 GX2's 1GB frame buffer, two 65nm GPUs and 256 Stream processors to make this one seriously expensive graphics card. [[H] Enthusiast]

Acer Aspire 9800 20.1-inch Laptop With HD DVD Released

Jason Chen — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 21:10:52 EDT

Starting at an astronomical price of $2,800, the 20-inch Acer Aspire 9800 lets you take your HD DVD anywhere, as long as you can lift 17.2 lbs. Not for the weak of heart, wallet, or back, the Aspire 9800 has a Core Duo T2600, 2GB of RAM, Geforce Go 7600 graphics card, 240GB hard drive and an HD DVD drive.

The laptop—and we use that term very loosely—is available now in the North American market. We suppose it's useful if you want to use this as a desktop replacement that can be moved around the house or office easily. But if you want HD DVD in a "laptop" form factor, this is one of your only options for now. – Jason Chen

Acer Aspire 9800 20.1" Screen Notebook Officially Released in North America [Notebook Review via TechEBlog]

Acer Aspire 9800 With 20-inch Screen

Jason Chen — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 15:32:11 EDT

Acer's new laptop would probably be a little difficult to place on your lap, unless you're some kind of big-lapped gorilla. Weighing 17.19 lb. for the 20" version and 16.5 lb. for the 19" version, this is more of a desktop replacement that you can actually move around than something you would take to Starbucks to get some work done.

Its features are, of course, beefy. HD DVD, 1680x1050 resolution (no 1080p though), GeForce Go 7600, 2GB of RAM, two RAID-capable hard disks for up to 240GB of storage, and HDMI output with HDCP.

The Aspire 9800 is good for those who don't go many places with their machines but still demand some kind of portability. – Jason Chen

Want a 20-inch HD-DVD laptop? [The Inquirer]