Until recently, it was quite hard to acquire the latest/greatest hardware in Dubai. We usually had to wait a couple of weeks after products were available in east and west to buy them locally. However, we saw a bit of a change in the last few months with the nVidia 8800GT, AMD 3870 X2 and nVidia 9800GX 2 being available almost on the same day as they were announced. But nothing beats what happened yesterday. One of our viewers was roaming around in Computer Plaza and spotted a Point of View 9800GTX being sold for a little under AED 1575/- (roughly US$425)

He did whatever any loyal t-break fan would do- bought the card and brought it to our labs to see how it compares to the current bunch of cards. Without further ado, here are pictures followed by our standard set of benchmarks on the yet unannounced nVidia 9800GTX that is already on sale. We'll leave the commentary on specifications and features in a future article, however, a GPU-Z screenshot is preset for your reference.

GPU-Z says that the clock is set to 675MHz while Memory is at 1100MHz and Shaders at 1638MHz. It cannot identify the number of Shaders- I'm sure an update will fix that. Here is what the card looks like from the front and the back. Notice the two SLI connectors for possibly 3-way SLI with the 9800GTX. The drivers included with the PoV card were WHQL 174.40, however, the above screenshot is using the driver that we tested the 9800GX2 with.

Like most high-end cards, the 9800GTX is a dual slot solution and requires two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors.

We decided to disassemble the heatsink to find out what lies underneath.

Interested in the GPU and memory used by the 9800GTX? So were we

Lets go on to the testbed and see how the card performs following that.