X-bit labs

New Dual-Chip Flagship Solution from NVIDIA to Launch Next Week.

Category: Video

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 03/11/2008 | 03:21 PM ]

Next week Nvidia is going to announce their new graphics card that should become a flagship enthusiasts product for a while - GeForce 9800 GX2. It will be a dual-chip solution that should become a direct competitor to ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. GeForce 9800 GX2 is scheduled to be launched on March 18, according to the Register web-site.

It will be based on two revised G92 chips manufactured with 65nm process and featuring 128 shader processors. The GPU frequency of GeForce 9800 GX2 chips will be 600MHz and its memory will work at 2GHz. The dual-GPU card will look even more like a monster than their previous dual-chip experiment – Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2.

For example, we got hold of a few pictures of a mass production GeForce 9800GX2 from Albatron based on Nvidia’s reference design.

The card will have a dual-slot cooling system, two DVI ports and an HDMI connector. There will be an eight- and six-pin power ports for the power supply. Also, two GeForce 9800GX2 will be able to work in a 4-Way SLI system that is why the cards have an SLI link.

GeForce 9800GX2 will be priced at $599. The remarkable thing is that this pricing is a little lower than the average retail price of Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra. Some stores are already taking pre-orders and their retail prices are pretty close to the recommended one.

In addition to the GeForce 9800GX2, Nvidia will lift the embargo on the nForce 790i chipset on match 18, too. nForce 790i is essentially the same as nForce 780i, but with DDR3 memory support.

In a week, on March 25 Nvidia will announce one more card on 65nm G92 chip. It will be a single-chip GeForce 9800GTX. It'll run at up to 675MHz, with the memory set to 2.2GHz. The reference design of this card shows two DVI ports but no HDMI, and two SLI connectors for Triple-SLI operation.

Also on the March 25, NVIDIA will announce its nForce 780a and 750a chipsets.

Moreover, Nvidia might launch one more 9800 solution based on the very same chip: GeForce 9800 GTS with the supposed working frequencies of 600/1800MHz and 3-Way SLI support. The details about this solution haven’t been confirmed yet, but it may debut in April already.