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