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.....