In just about five days the son of the 7950 GX2, Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2 will finally be released and, as it usually happens the benchmarks are about to be pouring in. The first in-detail benchmark of the upcoming dual-G92, dual-PCB card has now been posted and it offers an initial idea of what it is capable of.

Backed up by a system consisting of an Intel QX6850 CPU at 3.0 GHz and an Asus Striker II Formula mortherboard, and equipped with Windows Vista and the ForceWare 173.67 beta drive, the GeForce 9800 GX2 was put up against another dual-GPU card, the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

Although it didn't finish all the tests, probably due to a driver bug, the 9800 GX2 has managed to beat the Radeon in almost all benchmarks - 3DMark06, Half-Life 2 Episode Two, Unreal Tournament 3 and Call of Duty 4 at a 2560x1600 resolution and Company of Heroes, Call of Juarez and World in Conflict at 1920x1200.

In the Crysis test however, at a 1920x1200 resolution with AF0 (anisotropic filtering) the G92-powered card came out on top but scaled like heck and was slower than the 3870 X2 when the AF was set to 4. It would be interesting to see if the ForceWare 174.51 can bring the GeForce 9800 GX2's performance even higher but for now, this test will do, especially as the release date is so close. You can see all the pretty graphs with the results here.