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EVGA's Superclocked edition of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at an affordable price. You can expect it to play most current PC games at smooth frame rates, especially on lower resolutions. We've seen prices as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you would be wise to shop around. And those with limited upgrade room might consider the comparable card from ATI , the Radeon HD 4850 that, unlike the double-wide GeForce GTX 9800+, requires only a single expansion slot. Otherwise, the differences between these two cards, in price, power consumption, and speed are negligible.
| EVGA GeForce GTX+ 9800 Superclocked | Diamond Radeon HD 4850 | |
| Price | $165 | $180 |
| Manufacturing process | 55nm | 55nm |
| Core clock | 756MHz | 625MHz |
| Stream processors | 128 | 800 |
| Stream processor clock | 1,836MHz | NA |
| Memory | 512MB | 512MB |
| Memory speed | 1.1GHz | 993MHz |
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ chip debuted last July for around $230. In this "Superclocked" design from EVGA, Nvidia's chip has its core clock speed boosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was supposed to be Nvidia's Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you'll see on our charts, even this overclocked model only barely outperforms its competition.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 |
1,400 x 960 | |
1,680 x 1,050 | |
1,920 x 1,080 |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|
1,440 x 900 | |
1,680 x 1,050 | |
1,920 x 1,200 |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
|
1,440 x 900 | |
1,680 x 1,050 | |
1,920 x 1,200 |
We ran some rather aggressive benchmarks on these cards, and for the most part they held up well. The exception, as usual, is Crysis, on which neither card was able to achieve a playable frame rate. Even if the Radeon card was faster on that test than the GeForce, it's still only hitting 20 frames per second on 1,400x960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x resulted in frame rates around 35 fps, but still well below the 60 frames per second hallowed ground.
