Nvidia decides not to rebrand 9800 GT as GTS 240

Following Nvidia’s highly questionable decision to rebrand its GeForce 9800 GTX+ as the GeForce GTS 250 last month, it looks as though the company has learned its lesson from the public reaction. According to DailyTech, the company had similar plans to rebrand the GeForce 9800 GT as the GeForce GTS 240, but has now decided against it.

The site claims to have seen a confidential email from the company in response to “pressure from frustrated GPU board partners,” which tells its customers to ignore the GeForce GTS 240 brand and instead focus on three types of card bearing the GeForce 9800 GT name. As well as the vanilla GeForce 9800 GT, there is also a GeForce 9800 GT OC and a reduced-power version.

In the same way that the GeForce 9800 GTX was effectively a rebrand of the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS with a few extras, the GeForce 9800 GT was a rebrand of the GeForce 8800 GT with exactly the same specifications. Both GPUs had 112 stream processors clocked at 1.5GHz, a GPU clock speed of 600MHz, 512MB of 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) GDDR3 memory and support for 2-way SLI.

As such, it was even more of a straight renaming operation than the GeForce 9800 GTX rebrand, which at least offered 3-way SLI support and an increased stream processor clock speed over the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS. However, later models of the 9800 GT were fabricated on a 55nm process rather than the 65nm process used to make the GeForce 8800 GT.

Would you rather Nvidia stuck with the GeForce 9800 GT brand or changed it to the GTS 240 to have a consistent naming strategy? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.