Nvidia's upcoming Geforce 9800 GX2 behemoth seems to have some issues that will prevent it from showing up on February the 19th. Nvidia is rumored to have delayed the dual-GPU graphics card to an undisclosed
date in March because of some problems with heat dissipation and SLI scalin, rather than the advent of the Chinese New Year, as previously reported.
The giant graphics card from Nvidia is rumored to be affected by the same issues that prevented AMD's Radeon HD 2870 X2 card from reaching the shelves on time. Advanced Micro Devices' dual-GPU card had some issues with the ventilation system, that would push hot air from the first GPU over the second graphics processor. The reference card's cooling was re-designed before it entered mass-availability.
The Geforce 9800 GX2 seems to have the same issues with heat, and will get delayed until March. The board is heating up much more than it was estimated. The thermal envelope goes way beyond the 250W initial specifications, and system integrators are not quite pleased with its performance. However, the retail market does not seem to have a problem with the excessive heat, as long as the graphics card won't lose in terms of performance.
The second issue that keeps the card away from the retailers' shelves is the fact that the company has not reached the optimal performance when scaling two GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards. Three-Way SLI links will not be available for the GeForce 9800 GX2, but instead, users could enjoy Quad SLI with two of these graphics cards joined on the same motherboard. The actual overall performance for two GeForce 9800 X2 cards can be compared with that of two GeForce 7950 GX2 units, which is not quite enough.
The GeForce 9800 GX2 is definitely worth its waiting, given its initial benchmarking scores that hit he web. We have seen the card running in a quad-SLI link back during the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it was overkill.
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