ZOTAC nVidia GeForce 9800GT Eco 1 GB DDR3 DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card ZT-98GEY3M-FSL

Despite being a generation old, this card can run even some of the newest games. It handles Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 at 1680x1050 with little slowdown, and most older games you can even run at 4x antialiasing, with a full framerate. The lack of external PCIE power plug is nice, but be warned, it is clocked 50mHz beneath the default 9800gt levels.

The only problem though, is that owing to the single-slot cooler, this card is *loud*. My computer was designed to be a quiet system, and this was unfortunately the loudest component. I ended up getting a third-party cooler, sacrificing the single-slot size for my eardrums. I also was able to overclock it to regular 9800gt levels.

I love the looks. It's extremely quiet which is perfect for HTPC setups. Zotac Live chat support is very quick and helpful. Unfortunately I kept getting "driver has crashed and recovered" errors every 30 seconds and it was unusable. There is no point waiting up to a year for Nvidia to fix the issue if I can't use the computer at all with it. Microsoft does show a 9800GT ECO in their compatibility list but the part number was off by a letter. I think it was M and L. I don't know what the differences are but mine was not the one listed. I tried both 32 and 64 bit and it didn't work in either. I did not try either version of Vista but it worked excellent in XP.

I bought this video card because the one I had was not up to snuff when I came to rendering my videos in HD. My editing software would always hang and then crash. This doesn't happen anymore!

The Zotac nVidea GeForce 9800GT was easy to install, just push it into the PCIe slot. I had downloaded the driver from the manufacturer's site; but once I had the card in, I had to use the CD-ROM included in the box to make it all work.

I thought I'd have to hook it up to the power supply. The box mentioned it and so did the description on the Amazon page, but none was necessary.

Video editing is going much more smoothly now. I'm happy with this purchase.

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System requirements:
- 800MHz or higer speed processor
- at least 128MB system memory
- PCI-Express slot
- CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
- 100MB free hard disk space
- Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista
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