TweakTown New Content Alert for June 17th 2008

[JackW]

It was always going to happen; the testing of two and three GTX 280 cards. We had hoped to have had it ready by launch date, and we've fortunately done it with an absolutely massive weekend that has involved over 250 benchmark runs across four different motherboards.

Before we get into it though, we have to laugh at our power supply situation. When we started testing our Tri SLI setup with a 1000 Watt Zalman PSU, we ran into some problems. During the Canyon test on 3DMark06, the system would just shut down! - Since this would seem to resemble a power problem, it was time to pull out a HX 620 Watt and do a bit of ghetto modding to get the two power supplies working together. What we ended up doing is running one GTX 280 off the Corsair HX 620 PSU while the 1000 Watt took care of the other two cards and the rest of the system.

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Word on the GT200 has been floating around for a while now, and we've seen a number of leaked benchmarks all over the world wide interweb. With the NDA being lifted, it's time to check out what exactly is going on with the new card.

What we will be doing today is checking out exactly how much faster the new GTX 280 is when compared to the 9800 GX2, along with seeing how it compares against the top of the range AMD offering; the HD 3870 X2. For further good measure, we'll also try it against one of the better valued for money NVIDIA cards at the moment; the 9800 GTX.

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Over the past year I have looked at several high performance heatsinks from various manufacturers. The mould has stayed the same for nearly all of the coolers; build it tall and put large 120mm fans that push the air to the top or rear of the case and hope a case fan removes the air quickly. This is a very efficient way to cool a processor, but it leaves pockets of air around the motherboard.

Thermaltake has responded to the complaints of the motherboard manufacturers in a big way; they've brought the Orb design back into the big leagues. This time it's as a twin fan that will not only cool your processor, but your memory, back side of your graphics card and motherboard as well.

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When it comes to overclocked cards, there are only a few companies that really take it to the max. Zotac go pretty hard with its AMP! Edition line-up while Palit get some pretty mean speeds with the Sonic models. The only other company that really takes the time to test the cards and get into the high overclocks would be ASUS with its TOP line-up.

Today we're looking at the latter of the bunch; the ASUS 9800 GTX TOP which carries quite a menacing core and memory clock that makes it stand out from the pack. While the 9800 GTX might not offer the leaps and bounds performance increase that we thought it would at launch, it has brought performance computing down in price making it a very good option for people who are looking at building a decent gaming rig.

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