Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX

he good: Just barely faster than the competing card from ATI; more power-efficient at idle than its competition.

The bad: Double-wide card takes up more expansion room.

The bottom line: EVGA's GeForce GTX 9800+ Superclocked edition has basically the same price-performance benefit as its Radeon HD 4850-based graphics card competition. With identical bang-for-the-buck, you'll like this card if you demand power efficiency, but you should turn to ATI's card if your PC has limited upgrade room.

EVGA's Superclocked edition of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ is a fast 3D graphics card at an affordable price. You can expect it to play most current PC games at smooth frame rates, especially on lower resolutions. We've seen prices as low as $165 and as high as $235, so you would be wise to shop around. And those with limited upgrade room might consider the comparable card from ATI , the Radeon HD 4850 that, unlike the double-wide GeForce GTX 9800+, requires only a single expansion slot. Otherwise, the differences between these two cards, in price, power consumption, and speed are negligible.

	EVGA GeForce GTX+ 9800 Superclocked	Diamond Radeon HD 4850
Price	$165	$180
Manufacturing process	55nm	55nm
Core clock	756MHz	625MHz
Stream processors	128	800
Stream processor clock	1,836MHz	NA
Memory	512MB	512MB
Memory speed	1.1GHz	993MHz

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 9800+ chip debuted last July for around $230. In this "Superclocked" design from EVGA, Nvidia's chip has its core clock speed boosted to 756MHz, from its stock 738MHz setting. This chip was supposed to be Nvidia's Radeon HD 4850-killer, but as you'll see on our charts, even this overclocked model only barely outperforms its competition.

Crysis (Assault Harbor, DirectX 10, 64-bit, very high, 4x AA)(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Far Cry 2 (ranch medium, DirectX 10, very high)(Longer bars indicate better performance)

We ran some rather aggressive benchmarks on these cards, and for the most part they held up well. The exception, as usual, is Crysis, on which neither card was able to achieve a playable frame rate. Even if the Radeon card was faster on that test than the GeForce, it's still only hitting 20 frames per second on 1,400x960, the lowest resolution we tried. Dropping the detail level down to medium and the anti-aliasing to 2x resulted in frame rates around 35 fps, but still well below the 60 frames per second hallowed ground.