Yet more info on the 9800 GX2...

There's an excellent review on Tom's that compares the GX2 to both the 8800 Ultra and AMD's dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. It's pretty much as expected - at 1920x1200, the GX2 is on average about 30% faster than the other cards, but at 2560x1600 it ends up being only slightly faster than an Ultra because of the greater amount of video memory.

Oh, that reminds me - helpful tip time! We often make a point of explaining to our customers that two 512MB cards in SLI mode does not give you 1GB of video RAM - an SLI setup's total amount of usable memory is the same as the total amount of one of the cards (so 512MB in that example.) The same applies to the 9800 GX2! This is important to remember because the cards are advertised as having 1GB of memory, but effectively it's 512MB. That means the 8800 GTX, the Ultra, and the 1GB versions of the 8800 GT/GTS all have more video memory than the GX2. That won't matter as much at resolutions lower than 1920x1200, but you shouldn't buy a GX2 for those resolutions anyway. Much depends on what game you're playing, what resolution you're playing at, and what settings you're willing to live with when considering this card for purchase. Also, next week we'll see if the new drivers which allow Quad-SLI will make a compelling argument for a pair of GX2s.

At the moment, all I can say for certain is that the GX2 is a better choice than the Radeon HD 3870 X2, and that I'd wait another week or two before buying one to see both the new drivers and the 9800 GTX...