GeForce 9800 GTX arrives: NVIDIA product launching fest continues!

It seems kind of ironic to have GeForce 9800 GTX launching day happens on April Fool's Day. However, it didn't fool anyone as the card is really here among us. To make it better, it's a hard launch with immediate availability of the card in major retail stores. Gamers rejoice!

Here's a rundown on the specs of 9800 GTX:

Graphics Chip: G92 (65 nm, 754 million transistors)
No. of Stream processors: 128
Core Clock: 675 MHz
Shader Clock: 1688 MHz
Memory Size: 512 MB
Memory Clock : 1100 Mhz (2.2 GHz effective)
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 70.4 GB/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 43.2 GTexels/sec
ROPs : 16
Texture Filtering Unit: 64
Form Factor : 2-slot
Power Connector: 6-pin X 2
Max. Power Consumption: 156W

This card runs on PCIE 2.0 bus, although I suspect it still functions on PCIE 1.0.

Looking at the specs above, what can you see? Something familiar? Yes, GeForce 9800 GTX is very much a 8800 GTS 512MB, with a major difference being the core clock speed (675 against 650) and the resulting shader clock speed. The memory clock also receives a bit of a bump (1100 against 970 in 8800 GTS 512).

GeForce 9800 GTX is going to sell around $299-$349.

Reviews are already around (that's fast!), so take your pick from these various sources:

• Overclock3D
  
• PCPerspective
  
• techPowerUp
• HotHardware
  
• Hexus
  
• LegitReviews
• FiringSquad
  
• Guru3d
  
• HardOCP

To be honest, I'm not even sure if it has been an exciting array of product launches from NVIDIA. I mean, 3 variants of G92-based cards after 8800 GT doesn't really hype things up for me anymore. What do you think?