Conclusion, certification and where to buy
ZOTAC's GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! Edition was always going to be a hard sell - with the reference-clocked 9800 GTX+ available for under £130 and the far faster GTX 260 available for £165. Knowing this, there's very little room to place an intermediate product, and you have to get the pricing spot on.
Unfortunately, ZOTAC's GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! carries far too high a premium for little to no performance gain over the reference-like design, and thus simply cannot compete with the slightly dearer GTX 260.
If the price premium was more reasonable, and the performance higher, there could be a sweet-spot for a pre-overclocked 9800 GTX+, but at its current pricing there are simply better alternatives to the ZOTAC 9800 GTX+ AMP! Edition.
Bottom line: sandwiched between a default-clocked 9800 GTX+ and the newer-architecture GeForce GTX 260, there's very little wiggle room for the ZOTAC AMP!
HEXUS.certification
The ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! Edition receives the HEXUS.labs certification for successfully completing our benchmark suite without issue and is therefore a safe purchase; however this is not in itself an outstanding recommendation to buy.
HEXUS Where2Buy
ZOTAC's GeForce 9800 GTX+ AMP! can be purchased for £147.59 here.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any ZOTAC representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
