MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB

Conclusion:

The MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB OC graphics card is currently retailing for about $120 USD, which isn't a bad deal at all considering most Radeon HD 4830 graphics cards cost more than that, yet the 9800GT was outperforming the HD 4830 in our Linux tests. In addition, the GeForce 9800GT is able to offload video decoding of H.264, MPEG, and WMV3 to the GPU with impressive results as shown by our VDPAU benchmarks. On top of that, the MSI GeForce 9800GT was very quiet during operation and we had run into no thermal issues with the GPU core never reporting a temperature above 60°C. One of the features though not supported by the NVIDIA Linux driver is the HybridPower feature.

The GeForce 9800GT was well separated from the GeForce 9800GTX in a number of the tests, but there's a $50 difference that separates these two cards. In all tests though -- with the exception of those using the Unigine engine where it may become a bit slow -- the MSI GeForce 9800GT was able to sustain playable framerates.

Our only complaint surrounding the MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB OC was the issues we experienced when trying to overclock this graphics card using CoolBits on Linux. With other graphics cards we never experienced any system going awry when using the auto-detect mode or trying to push the frequencies manually. We are continuing to explore this issue and will update this article if we come to any conclusive findings with this issue.

If you are a gamer on a budget or looking for a graphics card that is powerful for multimedia tasks and desktop tasks, the MSI GeForce 9800GT is a great fit. The benefits that the MSI GeForce 9800GT has over other brands is the enhanced cooler and factory overclock.