NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX 512MB

Overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX had worked well with CoolBits on Linux. With ease we were able to push this G92 core clocked at 675MHz and GDDR3 memory clocked at 1100MHz up to a 715MHz core clock and 1186MHz memory clock. This isn't quite as dramatic as the EVGA 9800GTX SSC that runs with a 770MHz core clock, but even so, we were running stable with the 715/1186MHz clock configuration.

For our testing we had used dual AMD Opteron 2356 "Barcelona" Quad-Core processors, 4GB of DDR2 memory, 160GB Western Digital Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive, Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard, and Cooler Master 1000W power supply. On the software side we were running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32-bit with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and X Server 1.4.1 pre-release. The NVIDIA driver used during testing was 173.14.05 and the ATI driver used was Catalyst 8.6.

For comparison against the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX, we had benchmarked an ASUS GeForce 9600GT 512MB and ASUS Radeon HD 3870 (comparisons against more cards can be found in our forthcoming Radeon HD 4850 review). In addition, we had tested the GeForce 9800GTX at its stock frequencies of 675/1100MHz and then again in its overclocked state of 715/1186MHz. The Linux graphics tests used were pcqs-desktop-graphics from Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.1. These tests included OpenArena, Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, X-Plane, and GtkPerf. While the GeForce 9800GTX isn't designed for workstation usage, we have additionally results from SPECViewPerf 9.0 within the Phoronix Test Suite.