Legit Reviews

I don’t mean to offend Nvidia fans, and I don’t pretend to completely understand GPUs – But what’s up with the low specs in Nvidia merchandise, especially given their asking prices, $430 for a, IGB, 512 bit, 648Mhz, DDR3? And that’s from a reputable vendor. Who does Nvidia think they are – Mac?

There have also been criticisms regarding heating problems in many cards, and duplicate "budget" models like the 8800 and 9500 cards. Their SLI bridges appear to be more disadvantaged next to Crossfire, and it's really annoying deciphering all the jargon amongst the many brands - ECS NBGTX260-896MX-F... N285UD-1GH - GTX285? It's not exactly user friendly, especially for a novice buyer.

At the risk of sounding rhetorical; seriously, why go Nvidia?

nVidia 3d vision?

I don't see any reason to go with nVidia right now. AMD gives you much more bang for the buck, they've been consistent in their driver updates and they seem to be maintaining a steeper technological advancement tangent. Never would have guessed it a few years ago.

I would go with ATI cards right now. You seem to get better bang for the buck, at least at the moment. And this is coming from an NVIDIA fanboi.

There's nothing wrong with how nvidia does business. they believe the prices of their products stay competitive with the competition. ati and nvidia stay in business by making profits. you can't ask them or ati to make a smaller profit margins. regarding the heat with the cards, if there are problems they should address it. regarding the model name, nvidia has little or no control on how other manufacturers name models. regarding sli, it works just like crossfirex though crossfirex does have more configurations. your not really being specific for $430, what card is it?

sticky wrote:At the risk of sounding rhetorical; seriously, why go Nvidia?

Linux. No need for a $400 card for that, though.

trucz wrote: your not really being specific for $430, what card is it?

This Nvidia card isn't the exact model i was looking at, but it carries the same specs. It varies from $449 to $517 over eight online vendors in Australia.

Gigabyte N285UD-1GH - GTX285, 1GB, DDR3, 512bit, PCIE2.0, DSUB, DVI, HDCP, UD, ATX

Specifications
Chipset NVIDIA GeForce GTX285
Core Clock 648 MHz
Mem Clock 2484 MHz
Memory 1GB
Memory Bus 512 bit
Memory Type GDDR3
Card dimension ATX
Bus Type PCI-E 2.0
Bus Speed 16
D-SUB Y (By Adapter)
TV-OUT Yes (By optional Adapter)
DVI Port Y
VIVO N
Multi View Y
Shader Clock 1476 MHz
Maximum Digital Resolution 2560x1600
Maximum VGA Resolution 2048x1536

Even for the still higher asking price, these specs still arn't great, but then of course manufactures work by their own business model. And the add-in variations just makes things more confusing . You could actually SLI dual 9800s for the same price, if not cheaper, and get better performance?

Configuring SLI would would be cool though - however, I think that's only with supporting motherboards? In what way can you configure SLI?

As for heating aspects within Nvidia cards; I'm kinda missing my initial dual 9500gt setup now that we're getting closer to winter - I had it for only 6 months, and It was never given the chance to be environmentally friendly

I could be wrong but I dont think a 9800 SLI setup is better than a single gtx 285 card. I dont even think its close.