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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Friday, April 18, 2008
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XFX introduced a new video card recently with a low price and impressive performance called the XFX 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog. This card sells for only $119 and includes a full copy of Call of Duty 4. The performance of the XFX 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog is within a few FPS of the stock 9600 GT that costs more. For gamers on a budget of under $150 the XFX 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog at $119 is a great bargain. You even get a full copy of Call of Duty 4 which is still selling for around $40.
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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Not so long ago we took a look at a stock 9600 GT. Now we look at XFX's flagship XXX Edition; will it provide better value for money?
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Monday, April 7, 2008
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Well for starters not a single game title tested here was able to slow down a pair of these cards and in fact every gamed played, played damn good too. Even Crysis, which is a system resource hog, ran just fine with the XFX 9600GT cards in SLI mode. Actually no game currently released challenges these cards when in SLI and I do not foresee any games coming out in the next six months doing so either. Technology on the software side is starting to fall behind the hardware side in a strange turn of the coin as this used to be in reverse in this industry. Budget cards are becoming more and more powerful each quarter and a pair of these is in the very affordable range of most gamers.
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Thursday, April 3, 2008
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Priced at $349.00 it's replacing the 8800GTX that will most probably now go EOL (End OF Life) due to the fact that it is currently priced $10.00 more than the 9800GTX. Personally I think this is a bit of April foolery on the end users as the 9800GTX is a good card, but it should have been released as a different version of an 8800, not a new nomenclature altogether. NVIDIA has to have something more noteworthy up their sleeves, but with PC games on the wane maybe this is a turning point for the industry at large and their focus is on the next generation console systems. XFX makes good products and this card is just that a good product, but not a great one. I would buy a pair of XFX 9600GT 740m cards that are priced at $169.00 each and run them in an SLI configuration if my budget was in the $350 - $400 range as they outperform both the 800GTX and 9800GTX when ran in a single card situation. That's my take on all this so until later folks.
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Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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Today we are looking at a second of the new NVIDIA 9800 GTX graphics cards. The card up for review now is the XFX 9800 GTX. This card shares virtually the same specifications with the BFG 9800 GTX we looked at before. In the end the XFX 9800 GTX was so close in performance to the BFG 9800 GTX that it was a dead heat. This is to be expected since the cards are identical save the stickers on their heatsinks. What does set the XFX card apart from the BFG card is the fact that XFX includes a game with their offering. XFX provides the full version of Company of Heroes. Too bad the 9800 GTX doesn't include Call of Duty 4 like the 9600 GT XXX Alpha Dog does.
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We were able to take the core from 675MHz all the way up to 800MHz and the memory from 1100MHz to 1200MHz with little effort on the GeForce 9800 GTX. The most impressive part of the overclock though was the improvement on the shaders. We were able to overclock the shaders from 1688MHz to an impressive 2025MHz! This was the highest stable overclock we were able to get. We got a few benchmarks to run at 800/1250/2100, but the system would crash or lockup during testing. These are great overclocking results!
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Monday, March 31, 2008
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Today we are looking at the just released XFX 9600 GT Alpha Dog XXX. This video card has the highest overclocks you can get your hands on and comes bundled with one of the best games on the market. There is a lot to like with the XFX 9600 GT ALPHA DOG XXX. The card retails for $169 and includes one of the best games on the market right now. Call of Duty 4 still sells for around $50 in most stores. The card also performs well. The only complaint I had is that the new fan used on the card is louder than the fan on the stock clocked cards.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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NVIDIA has done a great job with Quad-SLI and with some driver improvements it should only get better. The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards running in a quad-SLI showed increased performance in every application we tested versus a single GeForce 9800 GX2, which is something that can not be said about the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 as they had some driver issues on Tomb Raider: Anniversary. We almost didn't include Tomb Raider: Anniversary in our testing, but our two store-bought DVD versions of Bioshock say they have been installed too many times, so this game was a last minute addition...
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Last week we brought you coverage of the new nForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset along with the 9800 GX2. Within that article we would have liked to include benchmarks of the GX2 in an SLI Quad configuration but due to a rather bizarre decision by Nvidia they asked all partners to withhold Quad performance until today. Members of the public could have bought two of these cards and used Quad Sli themselves, so the decision was for all intents and purposes, utterly ridiculous. Anyway, today we can tell you how Quad SLI performs but we want to do more than that so we will be taking our first look at 3-Way SLI using three 8800 Ultras and finally we will be testing in a fully ESA compatible system... case, cooling... the works. If you have money to burn, this is where you find out just how fast you can go.
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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Today we are checking out the latest NVIDIA based video card, and it is one seriously high-end performer. The new 9800 GX2 uses a pair of 9800 GPUs and delivers record breaking performance. This is usually the point where I say that I couldn?t run Crysis at over medium settings. Today for the first time ever I was able to run Crysis at 1920 x 1200, all settings on high and with 2xAA at smooth and playable frame rates. I used Fraps to record frame rate data from the initial beach insertion until the battle with the first enemies.
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Overall then, if you're after the fastest single card solution on the market, the GeForce 9800 GX2 is it and if you don't have an nForce motherboard, it's currently the only way to enable SLI technology on other motherboards and could quite possibly be the fastest graphics solution in that situation as well, given some of the performance differences between the GeForce 9800 GX2 and the Radeon HD 3870 X2.
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Today we have the XFX Nforce 790i Ultra SLI Motherboard in for review and we are pairing it with a 9800 GX2 video card, also from XFX. Is this is the fastest hardware currently available? We aim to show you, in our 29 page indepth analysis.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
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It's been nearly two years since NVIDIA has produced a dual PCB video card design and they feel they have a winner in the works with the GeForce 9 series. One of the reasons NVIDIA feels so strongly about the GeForce 9800 GX2 is because they have a whole new approach at how the video game frames are being rendered. The first generation Quad SLI technology seen on the GeForce 7950 GX2 back in 2006, used a hybrid mode of split frame rendering (SFR) and alternate frame rendering (AFR) to enable concurrent rendering on four GPUs. With the latest games utilizing complex shaders, inter-frame effects, and multi-pass rendering, SFR becomes less efficient...
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Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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All around for what it is XFX has made a great card here, perfect for the media center computer. Some of the best features being the ability to put it in a low profile case, an S-video out, dual monitor support and it's nice and quiet. This card is a great choice for those who want HDTV output for their computers as well, but don't want to shell out a ton of cash. Though not a gaming card, I give this card a Silver Medal for being a solid product in every aspect, and delivering all that is promised of it.
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Thursday, March 6, 2008
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All around for what it is XFX has made a great card here, perfect for the media center computer. Some of the best features being the ability to put it in a low profile case, an S-video out, dual monitor support and it's nice and quiet. This card is a great choice for those who want HDTV output for their computers as well, but don't want to shell out a ton of cash. Though not a gaming card, I give this card a Silver Medal for being a solid product in every aspect, and delivering all that is promised of it.
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