Despite packing performance that's a good few frames per second faster than a stock 9800 GT (or the identical 8800 GT for that matter), and overclocking like an absolute BEAST, the XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512MB XXX Editon isn't perfect. At load, its noisy little cooling fan spins up much too early, and will start to annoy after a while, especially as it doesn't really seem to take a whole lot of graphics crunching to get it going.

It's competition that's the biggest downfall for this card though. Despite boxing for position with the ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB throughout our benchmark suite, the XFX GeForce 9800 GT is a good £20 more expensive now that 4830s can be picked up for a teeny bit more than £90. At that price it's hard to look beyond ATI's little bang for buck wonder and if you're really set on spending close to £120 on a graphics card then a stock Radeon HD 4850 for £119.95 offers more go than the 9800 GT in the majority of tests - just be sure to bring some oven mitts as that stock cooler gets ludicrously hot even when idle.

Even competition from other Nvidia board partners is tough, with a stock 9800 GT from Zotac coming in at just £90 -- a tidy saving of over £25 for only a little less performance and you'll still get the Nvidia exclusive features like PhysX and CUDA that an ATI card will lack.