While the 9800 GTX might not be the revolutionary jump that we had hoped for, it’s still a very good card for someone looking at buying a new graphics card with this kind of budget. The first retail 9800 GTX we’re going to look at comes from ASUS and doesn’t carry with it any extra acronyms such as TOP.

With the 9800 GTX in hand we took the time to see how it goes up against other high-end retail cards like the HD 3870 X2 from ASUS and the 9800 GX2 from Zotac. While Dual GPU cards are good in theory, if the application isn’t able to make full use of the power then high-end single core cards can outperform them. Let’s find out how the 9800 GTX goes against these Dual GPU wielding cards.