XFX is one of the big dogs in the United States when it comes to NVIDIA based video card sales in the retail channel, along with EVGA and BFG Technologies. XFX has been a major ally of NVIDIA in good and bad times. They have branched into making motherboards, cooling solutions for video cards, and other computer components. Over the years we’ve had a good relationship with their PR people and the company has done an excellent job of marketing the NVIDIA cards as they’ve released overclocked versions and special edition versions of the various cards.
NVIDIA is the only major independent graphics card company left on the market with minor companies like S3 having small market shares. Intel and ATI make up the rest of the discrete graphics market with both also controlling the chipset and CPU market for enthusiasts. NVIDIA released their first generation DirectX 10 graphics card in 2006 with the 8800GTX card. Released along with the 8800GTX was the 8800GTS card.
Today NVIDIA bases their video cards on basically two chips, the G92 and the G94. The 9800GTX uses the same chip, with different specifications as the 8800GT, though the latter has 32 fewer Stream Processors. The 9800GX2 has two G92 chips on the same PCB. The 9600GT is the only G94 chip on the market, but with the price drops, is one of the better performance/price leaders on the market today. The card on the review bench today is the XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition card and it is a card that sells in the low $100.00 range.
