Last month AMD pleased us all by launching what we considered was the fastest single-card solution on the market to date, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. But we all knew it was only a matter of time before Nvidia's dual-GPU response arrived, potentially putting the company out in front again. Well, that day has come and Nvidia is finally shipping its GeForce 9800 GX2 to retailers, with promises to redefine the high end of the graphics market.
The GX2 contains two G92 GPUs each with 128 unified shader processors running at 1.5GHz, a 600MHz core clock, and 512MB of GDDR 3 video memory running at 1GHz. Nvidia promises to crush benchmark scores with this card and in fact, according to most of the reviews out there, it does. However, at a suggested retail price of $599.99 to $649.99 many might want to consider a different setup such as two 8800 GTs in SLI for maximum performance at the lowest price (about $200-$300 less than the 9800 GX2). Check out a few reviews at: AnandTech, Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Overclockers Club.