Gainward Bliss 9800 GT Golden Sample is only a couple of days old, and it comes with a large quiet cooler. Gainward did a nice job; so we see that Golden Sample 9800 GT card features 1024MB of GDDR3 memory.



On July 29th, Nvidia launched Geforce 9800 GT and Geforce 9500 GT cards in order to fill the gaps in Geforce 9 generation. Up until these cards hit the shelves, we didn’t have the cards above and below 9600 GT.

Geforce 9500 GT is a new low-end card coming to replace Geforce 8400/8500, and it brings some nice improvements compared to the previous generation. However, the new Geforce 9800 GT, apart from HybridPower support, doesn’t bring any novelties or better performance compared to the popular 8800 GT. That’s why 9800 GT is quite a confusing card for the end user, especially since some 9800 GTs support HybridPower, whereas some don’t.

Still, HybridPower is not such an important feature if you don’t have a motherboard with Nvidia integrated graphics, and although it will save you some cash when the power bill arrives, it won’t bring performance benefits. The card will automatically power down when not needed and rendering tasks will be passed on to the integrated graphics.



Gainward 9800 GT Golden sample comes with a GPU manufactured in 65nm and it doesn’t have HybridPower, but does it matter at all? Gainward overclocked their card, strapped on a better cooler, doubled the frame buffer from default 512MB to 1024MB and even left some headroom for additional overclocking, which, although its GPU is not manufactured in 55nm, makes this card quite interesting.

Bliss 9800 GT GS’s core runs at 650+ MHz, shaders at 1625+ MHz and the memory at 950+ Mhz (1900+ MHz). We already know that Gainward’s “+” means there’s additional overclocking headroom.



We tried all the Gainward-provided OC tools, and managed to clock everything to the recommended maximum. The card ran stable at 700MHz/1760MHz/2000MHz.



During operation, temperatures hung around 63°C and overclocking resulted in only 2°C increase.

Geforce 9800 GPU is based on Geforce 8x GPU architecture that with it brings unified shader architecture, DX 10 API support, but also some significant improvements (TMU, ROP, PureVideoHD) seen first on 8800GT and migrated to this card as well.

The memory is 256-bit, and 9800 GT packs 112 stream processors, 16 ROPs and 56 texture units. Most new 9800 GT cards are renamed 8800 GTs, but as soon as 65nm chips are no longer in stock, all the 9800 GT cards will feature 55nm GPUs and HybridPower.



Previous photos show that this card has a dual-slot cooler. The cooler hides the front of the card, whereas the back is mostly hidden by a black heatspreader. Its role is to cool the memory chips on the back as well as hold the front cooler firmly in place.



The card comes with 1024MB of memory spread across 16 chips, eight in the back and eight on the front. The dents on the black heatspreader clearly show the layout of memory chips. We’ve taken it off to see what kind of memory it uses and found out it’s Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ1A GDDR3 memory with 1.0ns speed (1000MHz), but on the card it runs at default 950MHz.



Gainward 9800 GT Golden Sample’s cooler is, thanks to its size, very efficient. The front memory heatsink and VRM heatsink are not a part of the cooler, but rather separate units cooled by the fan. The card is, just like Geforce 8800 GT, powered through one 6pin PCIe power connector.




This DX10, PCI Express 2.0 card will run in SLI mode but not TriSLI. One SLI connector is in its standard position and next to it you’ll see SPDIF in, which you will use if you want to route the sound through an HDMI cable to your TV. 9800 GT’s outs feature one TV-out and two dual-link DVI ports with HDCP and up to 2560x1600 resolution support.



VGA cooler has a small but pretty quiet fan, which is about 6.5cm in diameter. You can alter the RPM through ExpertTool where you can decide whether you’re aiming for silence or better cooling. The two heatpipes connect the cooler’s base to the heatsink that features a fan in the center. Such or similar design of VGA coolers is a common thing nowadays, mostly due to the fact that such a placed fan does a much better job of cooling as it cools components on its sides, too.



The cooler’s “hood” is made of plastic and it’s nicely painted with Gainward’s red logo.




Two heatpipes pass above the card, but their height will not get in your way.



If you intend to view HDTV, HD DVD or BluRay content through your Bliss 9800 GT GS card, Gainward supplies the SPDIF cable used to route the sound to the card, where it will start its journey to your HDTV device. Of course, there’s also a must-have DVI-to-HDMI dongle.





The box is quite nice and not as large as before, which means you won’t have to waste cardboard or pay for storage. It’s green and quite good eye-candy.






Testbed:

Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (Provided by EVGA)

Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Provided by Intel)

Memory:
OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18  (Provided by OCZ)
        during testing CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz at 2.2V

PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black (Provided by OCZ)

Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Provided by Seagate)

CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Provided by Artic Cooling)

Case Fans:
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM

Vista 32 SP1



Gainward’s 9800 GT Golden Sample card didn’t outperform HD 4850 in Vantage Mark, but it scored 5210 marks and took the place right after 9800 GTX. Geforce 8800 GT lost to Gainward 9800 GT by about 4%.

Reference speeds for Gainward Bliss 9800 GT Golden Sample card are 650+ MHZ/ 1625+ MHz/ 1900+ MHz, but using ExpertTool we easily overclocked it to 700MHz/1760MHz/2000MHz. Vantage Mark immediately benefitted from this and we see a 6% better score (329 marks improvement). Overclocked Gainward Bliss 9800 GT GS managed to beat Geforce 9800 GTX card.



To see whether overclocking has any real-life benefits, we took Unreal Tournament 3 out for a spin. Gainward managed to come close and even beat 9800 GTX.



The new Gainward 9800 GT at reference 650MHz ended up somewhere between 8800 GT and 9800 GTX. Radeon HD 3850 managed to spell many troubles for mid-range Geforce cards.



Not bad at all, we’d say. In Company of Heroes, Gainward 9800 GT is just slightly slower than 9800 GTX (2fps at the highest resolution which is 7%), and at the same time it manages to beat HD 3850.



Call of Juarez didn’t seem to like Nvidia’s cards and they lost the battle even to HD 4850. Overclocked Gainward 9800 GT almost ran on par with 9800 GTX, but apart from GTX 200, Nvidia’s cards couldn’t provide playable framerates.

Conclusion

Graphics is undoubtedly improving, but sometimes old equipment is being sold under a new name. This Nvidia’s marketing move where they decided to rename 8800 GT and sell it as 9800 GT in order to better suit the needs of the market isn’t necessarily bad, as we didn’t lose anything, but end users are confused with the numbers. There are two types of 9800 GT cards – those with HybridPower (55nm GPU) and those without it (65nm GPU). Architecture-wise, there are no differences apart from saving power with HybridPower, but that works only when combined with an appropriate Nvidia chipset with integrated graphics.

We all know that 8800 GT is a great card, and Gainward Bliss 9800 GT Golden Sample is a new name that will do it justice. Of course, in order to please the ever-demanding customers, Gainward decided to use a specially designed cooler that improves cooling as well as introduce some nice overclocking potential. The card is overclocked from 600MHz to 650+MHz by default. We once again see Gainward’s “+” after the numbers, which means easy overclocking. The card’s shaders run at 1625+MHz, and the memory at 950+MHz. Gainward used 1024MB of GDDR3 memory on their Bliss 9800 GT, but they used Samsung’s fast memory that runs at 1000MHz (2000MHz effectively).

Bliss 9800 GT Golden Sample is a good card that will set you back about €130, whereas Bliss 9800 GT version with 512MB of memory is priced at about €100. The higher price is, of course, due to 1024MB of memory and better cooling that will make overclocking a breeze. The card is ready for anything modern games might throw at it, and it’s hard not to recommend it. However, we still think that the main flaw is the price.