Legit Reviews

Built with over 1.4 billion transistors, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 280 and 260 GPUs are the largest and most complex GPUs ever created. Featuring 240 shader processors, 80 texture processors, and 1 GB of frame buffer, the GeForce GTX 280 better be enough to make you get all hot and sweaty. Read on as we look at the only water cooled GeForce GTX 280's on the market! We also test the card on 11 games/benchmarks and on Folding at Home (F@H) to see how it does against several other cards.

"Overall the GeForce GTX 280 graphics card was a winner in our books and it made a difference while gaming, which is the most important thing. The game we noticed the performance gains the most was actually Age of Conan when we cranked up the image quality at a resolution of 1920x1200 . Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures passed the astounding 'One Million Copies Shipped' milestone in less than three weeks after the game's launch, so that is a huge potential market in the months to come..."

Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Cards by EVGA and PNY @ Legit Reviews
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/726/1/
DIGG URL: http://digg.com/hardware/Water_Cooled_G ... ed_by_EVGA

Almost 6k ppd with these cards, are you kidding me. Wow, you can't get that unless your running 8 cores of SMP. Folding team get on this, rob a bank if you have to.

these are impressive when running F@H... the test system was sitting in the 290 Watt range running F@H and was cranking out 6,000 points a day on the beta client... My Skulltrail system doesn't turn in that many points and is over 500 watts and the system can't be used without turning off F@H... With GPU folding the PC was fine to do whatever. I was doing photoshop and running applications with the system folding its butt off.

Just wait till the F@H client scales with GPU's... 3-way SLI anyone?

the card is nice, but it cost as much as my house payment. I just can't bring myself to pay that much for A card.

You're right about the price, except that it's a bit more than my house payment....................

The wife would kill me if I even thought about spending that on a video card.

i'm done paying my car off in 2 more weeks.
a little research and saving and one of these suckers is going to be mine.

Now to find out how these compare to the AMD/ATI cards when released. I have to hope that this is their chance to pull ahead for a while.

This is really going to put the little folding teams out of the picture. And what makes it worse is that the bigger teams have better odds of people likely to get one of these.



Dan

(lol, but it's a great card for gaming, if a little pricy.)

I'm glad I spent my money on the 8800GTX, but now it's possibly time to buy a new one. So, who wants to buy me one?

Now guys, don't start lining up to buy him this card!

The folding will probably be throttled as far as points (Just like SMP has). I doubt stanford would want the bigger teams to knock out the smaller teams like this.

All i have to say is meh.
It seems to me like these cards are a very half assed effort. theve had since 2006 to work on a completly new core (not counting core refreshes) and all they get is a measly average of 7 FPS performance boost over the gx2? i know that the gx2 is a double core card and the 280 is only a single, but the gx2 is essentially based on 2 year old technology. IMHO 2 years of advancement should yeild more than a 7 fps gain in performance. Plus the gx2 is hundreds cheaper! i dont care how many transistors it has, i dont care how advanced it is. i dont care how versitle it is, if it doesnt put out good performance numbers its all just a bunch of money down the drain. until i see lots of mainstream applications that i benifit from (other than folding) this whole CUDA thing means nothing to me. i dont care if its going to turn my world upside down and shake the lunch money out of its pockets, it still hasnt done it yet.
</rant>
Nice informative review though. but i have a question: whats this?

can we get a core number on it? my guess is that this whole card is really an integrated cpu/mobo/ram solution that just doesnt have to run the windows kernal (which is why it has better FLOPS performance) and that that is the northbridge. my guess is that this thing in reality uses some nvidia trademark version of the good ol' front side bus, but im probably way off

I'm really not that impressed if the gx2 beats it in half of the different things, that being said it does do a hell of a job folding. Also In the "Final Thoughts and Conclusions" Section at the end, did you mean to say "a near era" or "a new era"?

dgood wrote:[snip]

Also In the "Final Thoughts and Conclusions" Section at the end, did you mean to say "a near era" or "a new era"?

doh! Thanks for pointing that out...You've got to excuse the typos since Nate was finishing the article after flying all night (plus, I didn't do my job as a proofreader! )

I want one of those sooo badly... only thing is that card is worth more than my whole computer!

wake me up when nvidia uses practical pricing tactics

Meh.....I don't see anything interesting in this card.
Why is it built on 65nm when ATI have been using 55nm for months?

If they used 55/45nm then they could have reduced power consumption, increased clock speed and made it less expensive to produce.

I think I'll wait for ATI's offering, as this is supposed to be faster, not to mention cheaper!

martini161 wrote:Nice informative review though. but i have a question: whats this?

can we get a core number on it? my guess is that this whole card is really an integrated cpu/mobo/ram solution that just doesnt have to run the windows kernal (which is why it has better FLOPS performance) and that that is the northbridge. my guess is that this thing in reality uses some nvidia trademark version of the good ol' front side bus, but im probably way off

That would be the NVIDIA NVIO controller. It was a separate chip on the G80 core and then on the G92 chips it was integrated and now it's back out. This handles the output capabilities of the GTX200 series, and it supports HDCP at 2560 x 1600. As for numbers on the NIVO - NV102-A2

The only picture I have on my camera card is this one:
Here is another shot I found on the web:

aircommando13 wrote:I want one of those sooo badly... only thing is that card is worth more than my whole computer!

wake me up when nvidia uses practical pricing tactics

Ok, but change your user name to Rip Van Winkle first.

Meh. Nice review of a not so impressive product. Brute force appoach didn't work so well this time and those things sell for far more than the MSRP.

Nate, this is one of the best written reviews you've done.