GeForce 9800 GX2

Written by - on 06 November 2009. Posted in GeForce 9 Series

To consolidate its leadership in the market and retain the title of "the owner of the fastest video accelerator", NVIDIA decides to release the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, which combines two boards with G92 chips. Keeping in mind the shortcomings of cards based on the GeForce 7950 GX2, the Californian manufacturer tried to avoid them when developing its new brainchild. With the release of the G80, NVIDIA remained the leader of the graphics market for a long time, until ATI - already part of AMD - presented its first two-headed solution in so many years - the Radeon HD3870X2, which took over the palm from the Californians.

True, the holiday was short-lived, and a few months later NVIDIA responded with dignity by releasing one of the fastest video cards - GeForce 9800GX2 based on a pair of G92 graphics processors. By the way, as practice has shown, this chip turned out to be quite versatile, suitable for both mid-range cards and high-end monsters.

In fact, the GeForce 9800 GX2 is a combination of two GeForce 8800GTS 512MB with slightly lower operating frequencies - 600/1500/2000 MHz versus 650/1625/1940 (chip, shader unit and memory, respectively). But, despite this, the design of the video card was completely redesigned, which made it possible to increase the cooling efficiency of the components of the new two-chip solution. NVIDIA did not use one PCB for two video chips, as, for example, a competitor, but placed each GPU and 512 MB of video memory on separate boards, which are like a mirror image of each other, between which there is a common cooling system.

11_98gx2_coolb1

Two cables are used to connect the half cards, and a switch chip is installed on the main board with a PCI-E connector to coordinate the signals between the GPUs and the system, leaving one MIO interface to combine two GeForce 9800GX2 in Quad-SLI mode. Taking into account the increased power consumption, about 200 W, each card from the tandem is equipped with a power connector: 6-pin on one and 8-pin on the other. The developer recommends using a power supply unit with a power of at least 580 W with one such accelerator.

Specifications NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2

Name	GeForce 9800 GX2
Core	G92 (D8E) x2
Process technology (µm)	0.065
Transistors (million)	754x2
Core frequency	600
Memory frequency (DDR)	1000 (2000)
Bus and memory type	GDDR3 256-bit x2
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	64x2
Unified shader blocks	128x2
Frequency of unified shader units	1500
TMU per conveyor	64x2
ROP	16x2
Shader Model	4.0
Fill Rate (Mpix/s)	19200
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	76800
DirectX	10.0
Memory	1024
Interface	PCI-E 2.0

Until the release of the GTX 200 series, it was the most powerful video accelerator.