Review: Inno3D GeForce iChiLL 9800 GT - the coolest card in the world?

HEXUS.bang4Buck

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 1,920x1,200 frame-rates for the four games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen four different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.

Consequently, the table and graph below highlight a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.

* the normalisation refers to taking playable frame rate into account. Should a card benchmark at over 60 frames per second in any one game, the extra fps count as half. Similarly, should a card benchmark lower, say at 40fps, we deduct half the difference from its average frame rate and the desired 60fps, giving it a HEXUS.bang4buck score of 30 marks. The minimum allowable frame rate is 20fps but that scores zero.

As an example, should a card score 120fps we treat it as 90fps as only half the frame rate above 60fps is counted for the HEXUS.bang4buck - this is the formula: (120-((120-60)/2)). Similarly, should it score 30fps, we count it as only 15fps: (30+((30-60)/2)).

The reasoning behind such calculation lies with playable frame rates.

Should card A score 110fps in a benchmark and card B 160, then card B would otherwise receive an extra 50 marks in our HEXUS.bang4buck assessment, even though both cards produce perfectly playable frame rates and anything above 60fps is a bonus and not a necessity for most.

Similarly, without our adjustments, the aggregated HEXUS.bang4buck total for two very different cards would be identical if, in a further benchmark, card A scored a smooth 70fps and card B an unplayable 20fps. Both would win marks totally 180, yet the games-playing experience would be vastly different.

A more realistic (and useful) assessment would say that card A is better because it ran smoothly in both games - and that view would be accurately reflected in our adjusted aggregation, where card A would receive 150 marks (85+65) and card B 100 (100+0).

In effect, we're including a desired average frame rate, in this case 60, and penalising lower performance while giving frame rates higher than 60fps only half as much credit as those up to 60fps. If this doesn't make sense or you have issue with it, please hit the HEXUS community.

Here's the HEXUS.bang4buck graph at 1,920x1,200. The graph divides the normalised score by the price.

The Inno3D 9800 GT iChiLL, priced at £110 or so, suffers in comparison to the reference Palit 9800 GT, which is a snip at £82.83, but when other reference 9800 GTs cost up to £100 its price is not unreasonable once one considers the uprated cooler, bundled game and pre-overclocked performance.

The ~£130 Leadtek GeForce 9800 GTX+ seems a better bet, though, knowing that the reference dual-slot cooler itself offers pretty substantial cooling performance and low-noise operation, whilst the card has the benefit of being based on the full-fat G92 core with 128 shaders and increased clockspeeds, rather than the cut-down core found in the GT. 

In our opinion, then, the additional £20 would be money well-spent.

However, the undisputed HEXUS.bang4buck champion is PowerColor's HD 4850, offering similar levels of performance to the GeForce 9800 GTX+ at the lower price of around £115.