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.
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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