Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 9800GT 1 GB PCI-Express Video Card GV-N98TSL-1GI

This new video card, released by NVIDIA only in late 2009, is unusual because it is a high performance video card which uses a fanless design. Those two characteristics (high performance and a fanless design) are generally contradictory for video cards: as video cards become ever more capable, their VPU's (the onboard video processing unit, a CPU dedicated video tasks) generate tremendous amounts of heat. This means that you will find a slew of high performance video cards on the market today, but all of them with the requisite, and often oversized, cooling fan. Fans are OK, but fans make noise, and often lots of it. This video card by NVIDIA gets us past fan noise by employing an extensive passive cooling system consisting of copper and aluminum heat pipes and cooling fins to passively transfer and dissipate heat from the VPU to the air.

How did NVIDIA achieve this? Well, the passive cooling system on this card is physically enormous. That's a bit of an exaggeration,...Read more

I bought this when my trusty 8600GT gave up. I'd tried a few BFG cards before and they'd all ended up RMA'd, so I went with Gigabyte this time. Not only does this card look good with the copper piping to cool it, but it's quick and has a good memory capacity which really helped improve performance in FSX.

I was mainly looking for a card to fix my PC, but a performance boost wasn't unwelcome and at this price it was a no-brainer.

Simple plug and play install in Windows 7 and works well with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Highly recommended

I am truly astonished at the Frame-rates I'm getting.

This card is a replacement for a BFG 9800GT (after less-than a year the fan went South, then of course the card overheated and died). After reading a bunch of reviews, I was convinced this card would be an upgrade

However, I was unprepared for experiencing more than DOUBLE the Frame-rates with the Gigabyte!! Astounding!

FSX is my best benchmark, and YES, I was formerly getting 15-20fps at mid-resolution. Now, I'm getting 25-45, averaging 30. Then I cranked ALL the performance settings & resolution to the max, and I was still getting 17-25fps... which is STILL better than the old card!

I don't think I have a real need to Overclock this baby... but I'll probably give it a try just to see what I can get.

Installation of the <>10" card in an HP Pavillion case was quite straightforward. Yeah, and this thing looks so cool you almost want it to be outside the...Read more