Gigabyte and Palit GeForce 9800 GT Face Off

Palit's packaging is somewhat different than most.  Their trapezoidal, high-gloss green box features not a barely-clad female warrior nor some WoW-spawned denizen, but a robotic frog nicknamed "Frobot".

There's really not much else to see on the front or back except for two decals - one stating the model as a 1GB variant of the 9800 GT and the other promoting the bonus game included: Tomb Raider Anniversary.  Contents include a barebones Quick Installation Guide, VGA Driver CD-ROM, DVI-I to HDMI and DVI-I to VGA adapters, and PCI-E power cable and a S/PDIF audio cable.  Ironically, the installation guide does not cover the actual installation of the card (however easy it might seem), only covering the driver install instead.

That crazy frog also makes his way onto a vibrant orange plastic cover that completely envelops the card.  It's hard to imagine that the cover actually benefits the card in any way other than possibly protecting the fan or channeling some air around the cooler.

Like the Gigabyte card, Palit's 9800 GT is a dual-slot solution, even without the orange shroud, as the card sports a similar-looking aluminum heatink with copper based cooler, in this case with the heatpipes running through the center of the heatsink up to the top and then down again through the side fins.  The main block is huge, almost running from the top to the bottom of the card with small channels cut in for the heatpipes.

1GB of memory is divided equally on the front and back sides of the card, with 512MB hidden under a black plate on the front which only covers the RAM, and the other 512MB cooled by a large heat plate on the back.  A line of solid capacitors and chokes lie underneath the furthest end of the cooler with a small heatsink placed directly on the nearby MOSFETS.  The heatsinks make good contact with all of the memory chips using a small thermal adhesive pad as the spacer.

Everything else is as expected; a 6-pin power connector is found at the end fitting into a notch in the plastic cover, a single SLI connector at the front (extra SLI connectors are only found on high-end models like the GTX) and S/PDIF audio input also nearby.  Two DVI-I connectors and S-Video are found on the double-wide bracket.

1GB of DDR3 comes from Qimonda using their HYB18H512321BF-10 chips.  Like the Samsung modules, these are also rated to run at 1000MHz, so there should be some headroom to play with when we get to overclocking.