Anartik.com’s Blog

I have been waiting sometime for a die shrunk, dual core 280 and I have to say I am a little disappointed in Nvidia. On the surface it looks like Nvidia’s single minded objective was to win back the single fastest video card title from ATI and the hell with the consumer. From the various test results I have read the 295 is indeed now the fastest single card beating the 4870 X2 pretty much across the board. What peeves me is they did not make a true dual core 280 or 285. In a nutshell they put downclocked 285 series processors on what amounts to a GTX260 architecture with 2 x 448 bit memory buses for a total of 1792MB memory (instead of 2 x 512 and 2048mb). In other words they did just what they had to do to beat ATI. Granted you can overclock (or buy overclocked) but the memory limitations remain and I would have to suspect the GTX285 parts are binned and better quality than the GTX295 parts. There has been a lot of mention that they reduced power consumption which comes from the die shrink but a lot comes from the clock reductions. It’s also a shame Nvidia is sticking with DDR3 vs. DDR5.

You can buy the GTX295 for around $500 which will give you the fastest single card but GTX280 or GTX285 in SLI will provide better performance at a premium. If you are limited by lack of support for SLI (X38/X48 etc) the GTX 295 is a pretty good option. For my part I will probably go with a single GTX 285 and maybe get a second when I ever get around to moving to I7 and X58. If you are looking for real price/performance look for deals on the GTX280. Retailers will no doubt scramble to dump old stock. Deals on the 4870 X2 are also worth looking in to as prices decline.

At some point you finally have to make the jump and upgrade and can’t always just wait for what’s next. I have already seen references to waiting on what’s next from Nvidia. If you have older hardware now’s a pretty good time to upgrade. I certainly would not lay out any cash if I already had a GTX280, GTX260’s or a 4870X2. I also would not expect Nvidia to be in any hurry to offer anything better until ATI makes the next move.