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ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+. Water-cooled and SLI "all-in-one"

Author: Date: 31.12.2008

Testing the speed of the video cards

We used the following test configuration:

Note that for ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ video cards you should use a motherboard with support for SLI. Apart from ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ video cards which will be tested only in the SLI mode and Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ video cards, in our tests we'll be testing Radeon HD 4850. All is simple - Radeon HD 4850 costs as much as one GeForce 9800GTX+. According to the price factor, we should have added GeForce GTX 280 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 into the tests. Right you are - the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit should offer a price close to these two video cards. But on the moment of running the tests we had no these video cards on hands, and it turned out that their tests would be redundant. We'll find that out from the results that we produced.

To test GeForce 9800GTX+, we used the drivers GeForce 178.24, for Radeon HD 4850 - we used Catalyst 8.10. We start introduction to the results with 3DMark tests.

At the 3DMark 06 suite, the combination of ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI was not much faster than the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+. This result is related to the boundedness of results from the side of the CPU in this outdated test.

At 3DMark Vantage, in all the three modes the indisputable leader is ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI. Despite the raised clock speeds, as compared to the old GeForce 9800GTX, the video card Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ proved to be slower at this test than Radeon HD 4850.

Then we bring in gaming tests which we ran with the 4X FSAA and 16X AF enabled. They will put all the dots on "i's".

At Call of Duty 4, the combination of ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI showed itself from the good side through demonstration of a substantial performance gain as compared to the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+. The latter proved to be faster than Radeon HD 4850 due to the new drivers and increased frequencies of the renovated GeForce 9800GTX+.

At Need for Speed Pro Street Racing, we also found no complaints about ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ – all was running fine.

Problems came up in Crysis where the combination ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI was running normally at merely 1280x1024. At higher resolutions, the game was continuously stopping, and once it even halted with an error. The single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ was behaving normally, however, note that at 1920x1200 its result proved to be much worse than that for Radeon HD 4850, although formerly there was no such a discrepancy of results. Formerly, there were problems with the distribution of video memory in NVIDIA's video cards which were especially vivid in Windows Vista. While in video cards equipped with 512 MB of video memory there were problems, no issues were found with video cards equipped with greater memory capacity. Once NVIDIA has improved the drivers, problems like these with single video cards either diminished or came to naught. But in the SLI mode, problems like these are still there, what we can see on the example of the combination ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI.

At Call of Juarez, there is also an issue with the SLI combination. The only resolution at which the combination ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI was running normally was 1280x1024. Then the speed dropped so immensely that the SLI combination proved to be slower than the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+. And the attempt to launch the game with the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI combination at 1920x1200 ended up in the "blue death screen".

At Race Driver: GRID, there were no problems like that, and the combination ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ SLI demonstrated good results, and the speed gain as compared to the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ proved to be not bad. Note that at this test the video card Radeon HD 4850 proved to be slower than the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+.

The results for Far Cry 2 are evident. At this game, there were the same problems as previously in Crysis. Tests of the HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ combination took much time since part of the launches ended up in stoppage and recovery of the video card's driver. But at the same time, the single Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ card was running normally. Nor there were issues found with Radeon HD 4850.

Final Words

We believe you will admit that purchase of ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ will not be a good value for money. See for yourselves:

• the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit proved to be noisier than the regular GeForce 9800GTX+ video card;
• the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit is complicated in assembly;
• the overclocking capability of the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit proved to be the same as that for the regular GeForce 9800GTX+ video card;
• the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit will be more expensive than two regular GeForce 9800GTX+ video cards;

That is why the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit has not appeared in the Russian retail. But it is easy to calculate how much it would cost: one GeForce 9800GTX+ video card costs about 5000 rubles; the cooling system Thermaltake Bigwater 760i costs about 4000 rubles;

In the end, the price for the ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit turns out to be about 14000 rubles. Adding 1000 rubles to this amount, you will be able to buy three GeForce 9800GTX+ video cards and assemble the 3-way SLI configuration. At 14000 rubles, you can buy one GeForce GTX 280 which most likely will not prove slower than the HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ kit with which there are much fewer issues. Having added 2000-4000 rubles more to this 14000 rubles, you can buy a couple of renovated GeForce GTX 260 cards with 216 universal processors and assemble an SLI configuration of which we wrote recently. Finally, with 14000 rubles you can buy a Radeon HD 4870 X2. There are many options, and a purchase of ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ is not the best of them. Here is a table of approximate prices for the tested video cards in the Moscow retail.

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	Content:
	Page 1 - ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+ Page 2 - Leadtek WinFast PX9800 GTX+ Page 3 - Benchmarking. Final Words Top Stories: MoBo: ECS X58B-A (Intel X58) ASUS Rampage II Extreme (Intel X58) MSI DKA790GX and ECS A780GM-A Ultra MSI P7NGM (NVIDIA GeForce 9300) Intel X58 and ASUS P6T Deluxe MSI P45 Neo2 (Intel P45) Foxconn A7GMX-K (AMD 780G) VGA Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 – a new leader in 3D graphics! ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+. Water-cooled and SLI "all-in-one" Radeon HD 4830 CrossFire - better than Radeon HD 4870! XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition in the SLI mode Leadtek WinFast PX9500 GT DDR2 – better than GeForce 9500GT DDR-3 Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic: exclusive, with unusual features Palit HD 4850 Sonic: almost Radeon HD 4870, priced as HD 4850 CPU & Memory: GSkill high-capacity memory modules CPU Intel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield) DDR3 memory: late 2008 CPU AMD Phenom X3 8750 (Toliman) AMD Phenom X4 9850 – a top-end CPU at affordable price CPU Intel Atom 230 (Diamondville) Chaintech Apogee GT DDR3 1600