Board analysis

Top of the PNY card

As we mentioned earlier, PNY’s XLR8 GeForce 9800 GTX OC is overclocked from the factory to run at speeds that are higher than your typical bone stock GeForce 9800 GTX card. But it isn’t a mild overclock; PNY’s card is actually clocked at speeds that are closer to NVIDIA’s brand new GeForce 9800 GTX+ than the 9800 GTX.

PNY bumps the clocks on their OC boards up to 725MHz – that’s just 13MHz shy of the GeForce 9800 GTX+. Meanwhile, the board’s stream processors run at 1813MHz. This figure is also 13MHz shy of the 9800 GTX+. Finally, PNY overclocks the board’s memory to 1160MHz.

In comparison, the GeForce 9800 GTX runs at 675MHz core/1688MHz stream processors/1.1GHz memory (2.2GHz effective) in stock form. The 9800 GTX+ also ships with 1.1GHz memory.

Dual DVIs

Overclocked!

Besides the supercharged clock speeds, the rest of the board’s features are pretty similar to other GeForce 9800 GTX cards. PNY uses the same board design and cooling unit as other 9800 GTX manufacturers. In fact if it weren’t for the “Overclocked” logo in the bottom right hand corner of the card’s sticker, you could easily confuse PNY’s OC card with their bone stock 9800 GTX card.

Except for the stickers, 9800 GTX+ and PNY 9800 GTX look identical

Overclocking the PNY XLR8 GeForce 9800 GTX OC and 9800 GTX+

With the two cards clocked so similarly, many enthusiasts are obviously going to wonder how well the PNY XLR8 OC card with the original G92 GPU compares in terms of overclocking to NVIDIA’s newer 55-nm G92b GPU used in the 9800 GTX+. Quite simply, does the new GPU scale any further than the original?

With its smaller 55-nm process, you may initially think the obvious answer to the question is “yes”, but it isn’t that simple. You see, the 55-nm manufacturing process that G92b is based on is TSMC’s half-node process. According to TSMC, their 55-nm process isn’t designed to offer any additional speed over 65-nm, instead the focus is on reduced die size and power consumption. To quote TSMC’s 55-nm press release: “The process delivers significant die cost savings from 65nm, while offering the same speed and 10 to 20% lower power consumption.” In our testing, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ consumed significantly less power at load than PNY’s XLR8 GeForce 9800 GTX OC: 387W for the PNY card versus 372W for the 9800 GTX+.

With lower power consumption, heat is reduced as well. With less heat, this could potentially open the door to higher clocks (given you’ve got a good sample), but it’s by no means a guarantee.

The bottom line is, don’t necessarily expect the 55-nm process to yield any OC’ing advantage over 65-nm. The process itself isn’t designed to offer any additional speeds over 65-nm. Where you will see a benefit is in lower power consumption. This could potentially allow you to reach higher OC speeds as the chip generates less heat, but history has shown us that if you’ve got a bad chip that just won’t scale, even the best cooling won’t help you OC any further.

It really is the luck of the draw if you happen to get a good chip that scales particularly well.

Despite all this, we were curious to see how far we could push our GeForce 9800 GTX+ reference boards in comparison to the PNY XLR8 GeForce 9800 GTX OC. We received two 9800 GTX+ engineering samples from NVIDIA. One board managed to hit speeds of 833MHz core/1253MHz memory/2040MHz stream processors. These speeds are quite similar to what we hit with the PNY card: 826MHz core/1242MHz memory/2065MHz stream processors.

However, our second GeForce 9800 GTX+ fared much better than our first board. We managed to clock the GPU at 853MHz, 27MHz higher than the PNY card and 20MHz higher than the other 9800 GTX+. Meanwhile we managed to hit 2117MHz on the stream processors. The really impressive OC though was the board’s memory: we hit a whopping 1312MHz, that’s 59MHz higher than our other 9800 GTX+ card.

With just two 9800 GTX+ reference board samples, it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions on how well the GPU overclocks, but based on our mixed results it’s also hard to declare the board an improvement over the 9800 GTX when it comes to OC’ing. Clearly the old adage “your mileage may vary” appears to apply.