Review : Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 Graphics Card.

What do you do when your chief competitor's high-end graphics card uses two GPUs and is faster than the high-end card from your lineup? Produce a dual-GPU card of your own, of course! This is the tactic Nvidia has employed with the GeForce GTX 295, based on a 55nm version of the GT200 chip found in their GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards.

The shrink from 65nm to 55nm makes the new GT200 chip smaller and more affordable to produce, as well as more power efficient. Both are necessary to realistically produce a dual-GPU graphics card; the original 65nm GT200 chip is an enormous 576 mm2 and 1.4 billion transistors, making it very expensive to produce.

The power draw is too much to put two of them on a single card and remain within PCIe specs without dramatically lowering clock speeds. At 55nm, the chip is down to perhaps a little more than 400 mm2, and with dramatically reduced power the company can finally put two of them together into a single graphics card.

Granted, it's still an expensive proposition. We're talking about lots of high-speed GDDR3 memory, two printed circuit boards, and still over 800 mm2 and 2.8 billion transistors worth of silicon. It's way bigger and more expensive to produce than ATI's RV770-based Radeon HD 4870 X2 (which is based on 276 mm2 chips and one PCB).

Nvidia is so determined to reclaim the performance crown that they're keeping prices aggressive—we're testing a reference board here today, but we're told the MSRP should be around $500. It's faster than a Radeon HD 4870 X2 in most cases, but how much so? And with price drops from ATI, is it the better deal in high-end graphics?

Source & Image : http://www.extremetech.com