14 DAY TRIAL // Reports on unreleased products sometimes get to be quite overwhelming and the fact that, in most cases, they refer to a release date set in a vague and undetermined future (generally described with the equally vague "soon" term) certainly does not help. This is also the case with NVIDIA's 9800GT, which is expected to drop next - on July 29, to be more specific. Coming as a rebranded version of NVIDIA's GeForce 9800GT, the new card has been spotted on the web as a custom built version coming from a relatively unknown manufacturer.
Although most European or American NVIDIA fans might not be familiar with the Unika brand, it looks like this Asian company already has a working 9800GT. What's more interesting is that the new card is built differently from the reference model, providing a custom dual-slot fan cooler that appears similar to the one that Palit used for one of its GeForce 8800GTS cards. Apart from that, the details about the new card indicate that we are dealing with a standard version of NVIDIA's upcoming G92-based card.
This means that there's no factory-overclocked GPU and that, apart from the custom cooler, what you get is a rather standard implementation of a GeForce 9800GT graphics card. Turning to the technical details, the card sports a 600MHz GPU, while the 512MB of GDDR3 memory works at a maximum speed of 1800MHz. With the 112 Stream processors clocked at 1500MHz and the DirectX 10 support, the new 9800GT should present itself to gaming users as a relatively impressive high-performance graphics card.
The price tag for Unika's version of the GeForce 9800GT hasn't been revealed, but rumors say that, once released, the card will be available for a price set somewhere in the $190-$240 range.
The Unika GeForce 9800GT graphics card appears to indicate that rumors about the July 29 launch date could have real grounds. It is then that we will also know whether NVIDIA is preparing a 55nm version of this GeForce 9800GT card as well.
