A tour around the GeForce 9800 GTX+
HEXUS was provided with a reference card, directly from NVIDIA. Expect to see partners' efforts differ in terms of the sticker and, quite probably, the clocks.
The reference card shipped at, well, reference clocks of 738MHz core, 1,836MHz shader, and 2,200MHz memory.
As we know, it's nigh-on impossible to discern whether it's a GeForce 9800 GTX+ or GeForce 9800 GTX from a look at the cooling and PCB - both are identical. Following a well-worn theme, think of the GTX+ as an obvious extension of the 9800 GTX, right down to the two-pin S/PDIF-input and provision for three-board SLI.
The reference cooler is quieter than the competiting Radeons', by the way.
A couple of dual-link DVI ports are just what you'd expect. GeForce 9800 GTX was driver-updated to support dynamic contrast and colour enhancements for better-looking images, according to NVIDIA. It also supports dual-stream decode, which hardware-accelerated the decoding of two video streams running concurrently. There are only few instances where we can see this being useful - picture-in-picture commentary, for example. The same technology has been carried over to the GTX+, naturally, and AMD's integrated it into the Radeon HD 48x0 series, too.
Summary
GeForce 9800 GTX+ is, for all intents and purposes, an overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX, and it will sell for around £149.
