TweakTown compares the performance of the 9800GX2 against the HD 3870 X2 from AMD. Here's an excerpt: "It out-performs the HD 3870 X2 in 3DMark06 under XP, along with it also out-performing the AMD counterpart in Half Life 2: Episode Two; a game that has always favored the AMD offerings. The card has potential, and we can see it's got the power in some applications. It just needs to be harnessed better. If you had been reading the reviews online and thought "Bugger this, I'm off to get a HD 3870 X2", we would hold off, at least for a week or two" Today they also have published another article called' GeForce 9800 GX2 Overclocked and Tested' in which they tested an overclocked NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GX2. Here's an excerpt:

You can see as soon as we let the 9800 GX2 breath more with an increased CPU overclock, we really begin to see some big numbers. Under 3DMark06 we can see we were just shy of 20,000 3DMarks. NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GX2 still isn't perfect though but with a good driver it could really begin to shine in the weeks to come but you get an early look with early drivers here today of what is to come. In our opinion, NVIDIA could have taken a different approach to the GeForce 9 series - instead of re-releasing the 8800GTS 512MB and introducing the 8800GT, these cards should have either not been released or released under the GeForce 9 series. The problem is that the 8800GT bought with it such exceptional value that NVIDIA were too high up on the podium. A new naming scheme should mean big things. Unfortunately at the moment it doesn't look like its being delivered.

The bottom line is spec for spec the 9800 GX2 is still lower than two 8800GTS 512MB cards. At least AMD didn't choose to release the HD 3870 X2 under a different series - the name that AMD chose perfectly explains the card: Radeon HD 3870 times two. This offering from NVIDIA is more 8800 than 9800 due to the fact that NVIDIA chose to implement the G92 core into the 8800 series products. The next thing we want to know is how two of these GX2 cards scale. If we can bench Crysis at 1920 x 1200 and get an average of 80 FPS, we will be happy. If we get a 5 FPS increase though we will be as disappointed with the SLI Quad GPU setup as we were with a pair of HD 3870 X2 cards in Quad Crossfire.