ASUS ENGTX280 TOP GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Card Review

NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 graphics cards on June 17, 2008. Both are based on the NVIDIA GT200 GPU which uses NVIDIA's improved, second-generation unified architecture. The new GT200 GPU, features amongst other things :

• 240 stream processors
• Twice the number of registers
• Fast local 16k shared memory (per cluster of 8 stream processors)
  
• New texture scheduler
• Double precision accuracy
• 3X ROP blending performance

For more information on the NVIDIA GT200 GPU, please take a look at the NVIDIA GTX 280 & GTX 260 Technology Report.

As one of NVIDIA's biggest retail partner, ASUS has no less than seven different GTX 280 models. They consist of three versions, each available with or without HDMI support. The three major versions are the basic ENGTX280, the ENGTX280/G game bundle kit and the top-of-the-line ENGTX280 TOP or OC overclocked edition. The card we are reviewing is the ASUS ENGTX280 TOP which ASUS says is 12% faster than "regular" GeForce GTX 280 cards.

Before we start with the actual review, let's take a look at how the ASUS ENGTX280 TOP compares against a few graphics cards, including the standard GeForce GTX 280.

lthough the new GT200 GPU has 240 stream processors, it delivers only an average of 80 textures per clock cycle, just 25% more than what G92-based graphics cards (like the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB) are capable of. Because it runs at a much slower clock speed of 602 MHz, it actually has about the same texture fillrate as the GeForce 9800 GTX+. On the other hand, the GT200 has a much higher pixel fillrate with a very healthy boost in memory bandwidth to boot.

NVIDIA initially pegged the GeForce GTX 280 as far superior to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 (with a stratospheric price to match). Their specifications seem to show it too, but when the Radeon HD 4870 proved to be much faster in real life, beating even the much-vaunted GeForce GTX 260, NVIDIA had to take both the GTX 280 and GTX 260 down in price and position. The new price point, coupled with its support for PhysX, now makes the GeForce GTX 280 a much more attractive proposition than it initially was.

ASUS took the GTX 280 one step further, offering the factory-overclocked TOP or OC editions which they promise would deliver at least 12% better performance than the standard GeForce GTX 280. They did so by overclocking the core by 11.3% to 670 MHz and the GDDR3 memory by 9.8% to 1215 MHz. Will it be as fast as they claim it to be? We will see soon enough. More on TechARP...

eVGA GeForce GTX 280 HC16 Hydro Copper review

Product:	GeForce GTX 280 HC16 (Hydro Copper)
Manufacturer:	EVGA
SKU code:	01G-P3-1289-AR
Information:	EVGA
Street price:	$629.99

Every now and then one of NVIDIA's board partners tries to do something special with one of their products. A nice overclock, custom coolers, new PCBs, there is a big bag of tricks to their disposal. But you have that, and then there always is a next step. Something weird, something special, often something very expensive. If you got cash to spend and like to go pro .. dude you gotta go for water-cooling. And if you combine that with NVIDIA fastest single GPU solution on the market, then chances are you'll have something special for sure. Manufacturers like EVGA can help you with that.

Take the GeForce GTX 280. A 1400 million transistor counting piece of silicon that raises the bar of single-GPU graphics processing. It's also a product that has been haunted and jinxed by a ghost called AMD with the RV770 product, which I'll now call Casper.

What sucks for NVIDIA, but is great for the consumer is that NVIDIA had to adapt their strategy. One of the big markers changed in that approach was to lower the pricing model of the top part of NVIDIA products. The GeForce GTX 280 dropped from an astoundingly overpriced 650 USD towards a way more interesting price. Though the MSRP is now set at 339 USD you can find (check here) the standard GTX 280 already for 419 USD ! And that certainly changed the dynamics, as that's a 35% price drop, making the GTX 280 way more flexible to put onto the market, and actually appealing to purchase.

Now why this long intro on pricing you ask? Well, what we are testing today is by itself unjustifiable expensive. So that massive price drop on NVIDIA's side helped out a lot, see, as for less than the original price 8 weeks ago, at $629.99 you can purchase the product we're testing today. But more on that later.

A water-cooled pre-overclocked heavily pimped out EVGA GTX 280 HC 16 is what we'll review today. Have a quick peek at the photo below and then let's dive into the full review.

Next page please. Read the full story at Guru3d

Geforce GTX280 & Radeon HD4870X2 AA Scaling with XP & Vista

Introduction

In this article we’ll take a closer look at the performance of ATI’s latest high end card, compared to NVIDIA’s top card. Both cards offer plenty of headroom when using the latest games. In our first review of the ATI HD 4870 X2 vs NVIDIA Geforce GTX 280 we found that you do not want to invest in these products if you don’t own a high end CPU and have a high resolution monitor.

If your game setup is up the challenge you’ll find this review interesting as we’ll be using a multitude of Anti-Aliasing settings to see how each card handles the extra rendering load. The HD 4870 X2 GPU can access its onboard 2Gb GDDR5 and this should give it an edge once the resolution and AA levels are increased. By how much you’ll find out on the following pages.

The second effect on performance we liked to investigate was the OS. Our previous review was done with Windows XP SP3. While the majority of users out there are still using XP, those into gaming and multi-GPU high end configurations are more likely to use Vista, and to be able to use more than 3Gb system memory, 64-bit Vista.

So we’ll investigate AA performance in XP SP3 (32-bit) and Vista SP1 (64-bit).



Which OS will offer the best gaming performance?


Read on MADSHRIMPS.....

AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB Preview - R700 a bit early

Today's preview of the HD 4870 X2 card from AMD proves that this time AMD was planning ahead. Our review of the RV770-based Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 cardsshowed the new GPU architecture to be very potent indeed and NVIDIA is very scared of what the dual-GPU version, known as R700 previously, would do to its line of cards. Today we were allowed to post a short "preview" of the card's performance and I have to say you will likely be impressed.

In our email about this preview AMD asked for us to "keep this high level and not go deep on the architecture" since they were "leaving something for the full NDA" at a later date. Hmmm....okay how's this:

• Two GPUs
• One board
• Radeon HD 4870 cores
• PCIe v1.1 bridge chip
• GDDR5 memory
• HD 4870 clock speeds
• 512MB buffer to each GPU for 1GB total
• 1x8-pin PCIe and 1x6-pin PCIe power connectors
• Remember the HD 3870 X2 design? Yeah, pretty much like that.

The card continues in the tradition of long PCBs, matching the size of the HD 3870 X2 as well as the 9800 GX2 and 9800 GTX designs. The cooler for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is of course a two slot design.

Though there are some bugs on the GPU-Z screen shot, you can see that the core clock is running at 750 MHz while the GDDR5 memory is running at 900 MHz- the same speeds the single GPU HD 4870 512MB card runs at. AMD is obviously serious about getting as much performance out of their GPUs as possible and would we would likely see an HD 4850 X2 card at some point too - much like we saw the HD 3850 X2 1GB card from ASUS this year.

Let's see some performance numbers from this new card:

Yes, I know we only got to test three games and 3DMark Vantage for our quick preview of the R700 technology, but I simply get away without saying that the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB was staggeringly fast. At our top testing resolutions the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB card was just outclassed by the new AMD card. Bioshock, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis all saw significant playability increases with the R700 compared to the GTX 280 at 2560x1600 and in a couple of cases at 2048 or 1900 resolutions as well.

Pricing and Availability

Since this is a preview of the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB card, AMD didn't want us to talk about pricing, availability or anything relating to their business strategy for the card. However, in some slides that they had already released to us during the RV770 launch we learned that the R700 should be coming in mid-Q3 and will have a ">$500" price point. That puts the card to be on shelves by the end of August with a price over $500 - considering the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB cards just dropped to $499 literally weeks after their release, NVIDIA is aware of the performance of the card as well.

Initial Thoughts

While it is hard to get a complete outlook of AMD's new Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB card with three games and some 3DMark Vantage numbers, our initial outlook for it is very, very good. If those idle power numbers can be improved upon with the updated PowerPlay BIOS as AMD claims, it will be very difficult to find weaknesses in AMD's new flagship product. The only exception might be the scalability concerns we mentioned above - that's up to AMD's software team to keep up with the PC titles as they arrive. Of course final pricing and availability are the real keys to a successful launch but as it stands now, if the Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB were selling for ~$500 today it would have our full recommendation. Full story at PCPer.....

Albatron unveils GeForce 8-series graphics cards for PCI slots

Albatron Technology has unveiled three new Nvidia GeForce 8-series graphics cards that use the practically outdated PCI slot. While the appeal of the PCI8600GT-256X, the PCI8500GT-256X and the PCI8400GS-256 may not be obvious for anyone who has a PCI Express or even AGP slot on their motherboard, there are still quite a few systems (particularly small form factor or HTPC ones) where expansion options are limited, creating an niche market for these cards.

The graphics cards are all low profile designs allowing them to fit in smaller cases such as HTPC design that try to match the form factor of tradition consumer electronics devices.

Of the three versions, the PCI8600GT and PCI8500GT models adopt faster DDR3 memory and also feature HDMI connectors for higher quality output, highlighted the Albatron.

Albatron PCI port-based GeForce 8-series graphics card
Photo: Company

Summer 2008 Graphics Performance Roundup

Well, after countless community requests and some arm twisting, but mostly because it started raining and we decided to stop playing Zombie Fluxx, come inside, and crack on with the benchmarks. Yes, it’s finally here (deep breath), the bit-tech Summer 2008 Graphics Card Performance Group Test! However, we’re confident that it’s been more than worth the wait, as we’ve performed one of the most in-depth and extensive hardware group tests to ever grace bit-tech in order to finally answer the pressing questions of modern graphics card performance: which card now sits atop the performance pile? Which holds the mid range performance crown? And most importantly, which should you spend your hard earned cash on?Needless to say that the last two months have been a hugely frantic time within the graphics industry, with both AMD and Nvidia launching impressive new graphics architectures and winding up the PR machines to spin out their latest GPUs.We’ve already looked at Nvidia’s GT200 architecture in some serious detail, and coverage of AMD/ATI’s R770 is on the way soon (we promise), but for this article the focus is on the boards these architectures have spawned and their performance where you, the consumer, will see the most difference – modern, graphically intensive games.For this purpose, we’ve gathered together the usual suspects of recent graphics cards, as well as the four new arrivals – Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280 and 260 and ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850, and tested them in some of the most popular and graphically demanding games currently available, at varied high quality settings and resolutions. However, before we plough into the bevvy of benchmark scores (over 450 of them in fact), let’s look into current UK graphics card pricing, and see how much these slabs of silicon will cost.

You thought the GeForce 9800 GTX was fast? You ain’t seen nothing yet

Review Nvidia has spent the past year waiting for AMD to give it a fight in the graphics sector. The G92 chip used in GeForce 8800 GT was little more than a die-shrink of the G80 that debuted in the original GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX.The GeForce 9800 GTX used the same G92 chip and supported DirectX 10 with Shader Model 4.0 - just like the GeForce 8000 series - so it was hard to see why Nvidia felt the need to move from 8000 to 9000 numbering. More to the point, Nvidia decided to ignore Shader Model 4.1 and DirectX 10.1, which is part of Windows Vista SP1, so it really milked the G80/G92 architecture for all it was worth.

Well, the time has come for a change: the launch of the new GT200 chip, which is used in this Zotac GeForce GTX 280 AMP! Edition as well as cheaper GeForce GTX 260 models. The GT200 is an awesome piece of silicon that packs in 240 Stream Processors - Nvidia's unified shaders - compared to the 128 in the G92 .That change has raised the transistor count from 754m to 1.4bn, and as Nvidia has stuck with a 65nm fabrication process, the size of the GT200 has increased to an enormous 24mm² which is four times the size of a 65nm Intel Core 2 die.Internally, the GT200 is divided up into ten clusters of 24 shaders and eight clusters of four ROPs with the core running at 602MHz, the Stream Processors at 1296MHz and the 1GB of GDDR 3 memory at a true speed of 1107MHz to give an effective speed of 2214MHz. More at Register....

A New GeForce GTX 200 -Graphics Beyond Gaming

Think what will happen if the imagination becomes a reality, NVIDIA, the leader in visual computing technologies has introduces a new kin of GeForce GTX 200 graphics processors which includes the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs .GPU is the one of the most powerful processors in the PC. Many normal tasks will be benefit from the graphics plus encoding and playing high definition videos, editing photos, reaching dynamic directions off the internet or running a new operating system. By identify the value of GPU transcends gaming, a number of applications are written that use the GPU for straight, non graphical computational tasks. Read more at ITvoir....

Zotac GeForce GTX 260 'Amp' Edition

Today we have the GTX 280's smaller sibling with us, the GTX 260 from Zotac. This card comes from their 'Amp Edition' line up, which are factory overclocked. The XFX GTX 280 that we reviewed earlier, performed well, particularly in games like Crysis with high AA. On the flip side it costs a bomb, so wasn't a very feasible solution for your HD gaming needs. Since the GTX 260 and the GTX 280 have the same GT200 core, I expect it to perform similar to the GTX 280, while costing a lot less. There's only one way to find out, so let's start by checking out the specs of the card. Read more.....