... a meet and greet with the GeForce GTX 295

Heeyaheeya-wooohaheeya... it's unexpected preview time ladies and gentlemen. It's been a while since ATI introduced their Radeon 4870 X2 graphics card, and well... NVIDIA just didn't have a product around to counteract that steamy X2.

Today is the day that we can lift up a big chunk of mystery that you guys have heard about in the rumor channel for a while now. It's the GeForce GTX 295. As usual, the rumors were pretty accurate. The GeForce GTX 295 will be an all new dual-GPU graphics card from NVIDIA based on the 55nm GeForce GTX 200 derivatives.

With that knowledge in mind, today we'll present you a fairly deep preview of what's to come. NVIDIA will launch new 55nm parts at CES 2009 in Las Vegas, January 8th. Much like ATI did, NVIDIA also wanted to get an early engineering sample to some selected members of the press. Guru3D is one of the few websites allowed to publish a sneak peek, as heck... this stuff is really our cup of tea isn't it?

Since the board we received is an early production sample, the power management features were not yet finalized in the BIOS and drivers. So this preview will be very much focused on the physical product and of course its performance. The temperature delta, power consumption etc. we'll show you in the final review in early January.

Obviously we'll talk a little about what we are dealing with over the next few pages... do a nice photo shoot and then I'll grab the current leading game titles to see where we are performance wise with the GeForce GTX 295. Of course we'll compare it directly with the competing product from AMD, the mighty ATI Radeon 4870 X2, as the sole reason for the GTX 295 to even exist is that funky red colored dual-GPU based card from ATI.

Lets browse to the next page, but not before I show you a glimpse of what we are testing today...