Closer Look: PALiT 9800 GTX+

The PALiT 9800 GTX+ arrived to me in a fairly large FedEx box. I assumed it must have alot of padding inside to protect the actual product box. I was wrong. It was all product box. The box was massive. The box is bigger than most average mainboard boxes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it offers plenty of protection but it seems to use a lot of extra material that is not needed. In this day and age when the buzz word is "Green" this box seems excessive. Don't get me wrong it's very well done with high quality print clearly stating what's inside and with a brief technical description on the rear of the box in 12 different languages. PALiT's love him or hate him mascot Frobot dominating the front cover.

Here we are with the nitty gritty. Included in the box is the graphics card, a DVI to VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter and the driver CD. Not pictured but included was a card with a product key for a FREE copy of 3DMark Vantage Advanced Edition. Not a hard copy of the benchmark tool, but a product key, so you have to download your copy from www.futuremark.com and enter your key during installation. I thought that was a nice touch and it offers a $20 value to the card. Let's be honest if you are in the market for this type of card, you'll want to know how it stacks up. Since taking these photos I've found stuck under some cardboard fold inside the box a molex to six pin pci-e power adapter and a two pin wire for connecting this graphics card to your soundcard to provide audio to HDMI via the included connector that is not shown in the photo below.

Out of the box you can see this card is clearly not your typical nvidia Geforce 9800GTX+. As a matter of fact it looks almost unrecognizable as a Geforce card and actually resembles an ATI card. The first and most notable difference is the red printed circuit board. Next would be the massive heatsink/fan/shroud on the top. These outside appearances are only the tip of the iceberg hinting at the differences in this and the reference design. PALiT is well known for making true non reference designs. This is nothing new to PALiT; they have been very successful with both nvidia and ATI non reference designs over the past few years.

The rear of the PALiT Designed 9800GTX+ only reinforces my thoughts on this appearing to be an ATI card. This comes as really no surprise as PALiT does make both nvidia and ATI cards. I've seen many an ATI card with this type of sprung heatsink retention bracket and if it works that's all that matters. We here at Benchmarkreviews.com are after performance after all there's no room for fanboys here.

The PALiT 9800GTX+ cooler is a dual slot design and although the entire card is not covered with a shroud and ductwork to direct the air out the rear of the card much of the hot air does manage to make it's way out the vented second slot cover. I'd say it's about a 30/70 split with 30% of the air moving out the rear of the case and 70% blowing down, out and toward the front of the case over the memory and power capacitors and circuitry then unfortunately it's recycled inside the case. This card has two dual link DVI ports and one S-Video port.

The top view of the card shows this cooler to be a dual nickel plated heat pipe design mated with many fine aluminum fins for heat dissipation. After seeing other PALiT designs which completely cover the card with a shroud I'm wondering why the change to an open air design now? Also visible is the dual six pin PCI-E power connectors and near the front the tri-SLI connectors. All pretty much standard offering for any 9800GTX+. So far the card appears to be standard in features but anything but standard in the looks department. Let's move on to the details section and get a better look at what's really going on with this card.

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