The 9800GTX+ from XFX is on the market for a $199 price point, or nearly the same price as the HD 4850 card and lower than the HD 4870 or GeForce GTX260 chip. There’s a lot of overlap in the video card market as video cards that were $350 are now under $200 and video cards that are being introduced now have different competition than the manufacturers expected at launch. Performance is higher than the 9800GTX and virtually the same as the HD 4850 in most instances. This card a year ago would have been the fastest card on the market but today it is a mid-range card. That’s the pace of video card companies and the price of technology.
SLI mode on the 9800GTX+ was easy to enable and performance of two of these cards is faster than a single GeForce GTX280 card installed in some situations and nearly as fast in others. The power requirements are more but you get the performance of a faster card for a lower price. Performance of two 9800GTX+ cards in SLI in fact exceeds that of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 card from ATI meaning that two of these cards are as fast as any single card on the market today. The GeForce 9800GTX+ is a fast card, faster than the original 9800GTX. There are already 9800GTX cards that are overclocked higher than this however, and the target of this card the HD 4850 has healthy competition with this card. The wildcard is hardware acceleration for PhysX games which can make a huge difference in frame rate in supported applications.
