GeForce 9800GX2 is due later this month and we can expect cards from a bunch of NVIDIA partners. All reference design of course as making your own 9800GX2 would be way too costly and just a big waste of money since this is a relatively short-lived and expensive card. Hexus has posted more than a few pictures of some of the GeForce 9800GX2 cards on display at CeBIT, none of them were in action though.
Albatron who early announced that it would be showing GeForce 9800 cards at CeBIT has kept its promise and presented a reference card. Meaning 600MHz core, 1500MHz shader and 2000MHz memory clock.
EVGA had two cards on display. One reference card and one Black Pearl edition. If you know you’re EVGA, you know that this means water cooling from factory. The price remains in the shadows, but we can only guess that it would add another $100 or so to the already high price.
Since the reference card is designed so that the cores are facing each other, EVGA has designed a single water block for cooling both cores at the same time. Convenient and hopefully cheaper than two blocks, but the question is if the performance will suffer from cooling both at the same time.
Hexus also confirms that the card is going to expensive, very expensive. They report prices up to £500 for the overclocked versions, some with third-party cooling. Keep in mind though that UK has a lot higher taxes than the US, but roughly translated it should end up around the MSRP of $599 we told you about earlier.
