ASUS GeForce GTX 295 review (ENGTX295)

GTX 295 Chipset Features

Let's talk about mother nature and your power bill for a second. See, this card has a 289 Watt peak power consumption. That is a lot of power being consumed at game time, which you can frown upon. There are obviously also a couple of very interesting positives.

You are adding a MASSIVE amount of horse power to your PC. Seriously, it's even a little crazy when you think about it. You have 2x 240 shader processor cores inside one graphics card, and as our previously published GTX 260/280 SLI results were already showing... that's a rather incredible amount of horsepower. The fun thing with the product now is that with that much power you can also have it handle future PhysX titles really easily without dedicating a GPU to PhysX, yet keep the raw horsepower the card really has. Heck, the more effects a game has, the better.

Some GeForce GTX 295 facts.

• Fabricated on a 55nm production node
• Two GTX 200 GPUs
• Accumulated 480 shader processors
• 576 MHz Core Clock frequency
• 1242 MHz Shader domain frequency
• 999 MHz DDR3 Memory frequency
• 2x 896 MB of memory = 1792 MB = 1.8 GB

So in layman's terms this graphics card has the memory configuration of the GTX 260, but the raw shader power of the GTX 280. And these two are then multiplied by a factor of two.

Some of you might wonder why NVIDIA decided not to use GDDR5 memory on this product, and that is a very valid question. Fact is that the GTX 200 memory controllers simply do not support GDDR5. So expect GDDR5 integration into the next generation GeForce graphics products.

We can already tell you that we were at the very least impressed by its cooling. Face it, two GPUs generate a lot of heat, especially with a dual PCB design and a 289W TDP.

The cooling solution is, according to NVIDIA, capable of dissipating more than 289 watts of power. Compared to the 9800 GX2 you can spot the differences as you'll notice the sturdy meshed metal plating, which has a nice soft black finished look. Overall the cooling unit should be able to show gains up to 40, maybe 50% in cooling over the older solutions. And it looks and feels great.

Over the next couple of pages we'll dive into a photo shoot where I'll tell you a bit more about design, connectivity. After the photo shoot we'll take eight of the latest and hottest games and benchmark this new graphics card to observe where it stands in terms of overall performance opposed to the current competition.