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The
Gigabyte GV-R98P128D Radeon 9800 Pro |
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You
Look Very Familiar... |
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With the active
cooler removed, it is virtually impossible to tell the
Gigabyte GV-R98P128D apart from an ATi built Radeon 9800
Pro. Gigabyte strictly adheres to ATi's Radeon 9800
Pro reference design. Even the color of their PCBs is
identical. About the only thing that differentiates
this card from it's "ATi built" counterpart is the gold
heatsink / fan combo sitting atop the R350 GPU. The
external plate is equipped with single analog and DVI
monitor connectors, as well as an S-Video / TV output.
Courtesy of the R350's inherent multi-monitor capabilities,
this combination of connectors allows the GV-R98P128D to
power two displays independently, either two monitors or a
monitor and a television for example. The BGA packaged
memory modules populating the board are
2.8ns Samsung K4D26323RA-GC2A pieces, rated for 350MHz.
Unfortunately, there are no heatsinks mounted to the RAM,
but as we've seen in the past with most other Radeon 9800
Pros, that shouldn't hinder overclocking much. The GPU
cooler is held in place with two plastic spring clips.
Removing it reveals the stodgy thermal interface material.
As you can see in the shots above it was making perfect
contact with GPU before we removed it!
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Screenshots with Antialiasing Enabled |
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Hulk
Smash! |
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The main reason
for buying a high-end video card like the Gigabyte
GV-R98P128D Radeon 9800 Pro is gaming. So, before we
got down to benchmarking this card, we installed it into one
of our test systems and spent some time playing a few
popular games. Over the course of about a week, we
played a little Splinter Cell, Enter the Matrix and Hulk...
When gaming with
the GV-R98P128D, we set the resolution to 1024x768 and
enabled 6X AA and 16X Anisotropic filtering (Note: AA is
broken in Splinter Cell. Only Aniso was enabled).
All of the games performed flawlessly at these setting.
Frame rates seemed smooth and jitter-free throughout.
Splinter Cell was great and Enter the Matrix was decent, but
we had the most fun with the Hulk. There's just
something about running and smashing stuff that makes me
smile! We snapped off a few screenshots with the Hulk
to give you an idea what the game looked like with the
settings mentioned above. The explosions and fire
looked great, and thanks to the Radeon's 6XAA, edges are
crisp and "jaggy-free".
It's time for Some Benchmarks!
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