NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 – a new leader in 3D graphics!
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Date: 25.02.2009 |
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The struggle for the honorable "leadership crown" among single video cards is going on. As is known, AMD has long been committed to the direction implying that its new 3D graphics flagships are made of two video chips of the provisional "middle" class. At the same time, NVIDIA is biased to a more traditional approach adding more transistors and "swelling up the muscles" in its single-chip solutions. However, that does not prevent NVIDIA from releasing dual-chip cards as well, in the periods between the global architectural updates to the graphic processors. The latest development relates to the flagship series GeForce GTX and offers the maximum index "295" the company has ever assigned.
On the example of Zotac GeForce GTX 295 video card which was courteously provided by the company's Moscow representation office for tests, we'll explore the card's exterior, its package bundle, interior arrangement, and the performance of course. Moreover, we'll verify how its performance is scaled depending on the speed of the PCI Express bus, as well as explore the power consumption of the video card in various modes. But - all in good time.
Zotac GTX 295 is shipped in a standard proprietary box which is equipped with a notch to let you look at the video card. Unfortunately, you can't touch the card through the window sealed with plastic. It would be nice to touch, but let's talk about that later. In this case, looking at the video card through the package brings little information - you can only see a black "bar" with holes and the proprietary sticker stating the name of the video card. The front side of the box provides more information – the memory bus width and the overall capacity - 896 bit and 1792 MB, respectively. Divide these values by two to get the right memory capacity and the bus width for each of the two GPUs of which the GeForce GTX 295 is made up of.
The reverse side of the box is not so interesting as the previous one, but here we can find a mini guide on building a Quad SLI system for which one GeForce GTX 295 video card is necessary (marked with a checkmark as available). We would also need the second video card and a motherboard with support for the SLI. As we can see, NVIDIA has provided for the option of merging into a SLI bundle and a new "dual-headed" flagship, which continues the former traditions.
Unlike many other manufacturers of video cards, Zotac is not shy about stating the nominal frequencies of its products. This information is displayed on one of the sides of the box. As you can see, the nominal frequencies of Zotac GTX 295 are equal to the nominal frequencies of GeForce GTX 260, as are the memory bandwidth and its capacity that falls on each of the two video processors. But there are also radical differences, which we'll be exploring a bit later.
Of the system requirements specified on the side of the box, we note the specified minimum rating of the power supply unit which amounts to 680 W (if the CPU Intel Core i7 3.2 GHz is used). We'll verify how these requirements are true to life once we move to the tests and explore the power consumption of Zotac GTX 295 in various modes. We say in advance that the cited figure is justified albeit a bit overstated.
The package bundle of the video card: user's guide, a drivers CD, a CD with 3DMark Vantage, a CD with the game Race Driver: Grid, an HDMI-HDMI cable, two power supply adapters, a DVI/D-Sub cord, a cord to plug in to the SPDIF on the motherboard.
As you can see, all the required items are attached to the video card. The HDMI cable will save time and efforts on plugging in the PC to the projector or a wide-screen panel. With 3DMark Vantage and the game Race Driver: Grid that come as bundled items, you will be able to assess the incredible level of speed of the new product and enjoy the exciting races with the maximum graphics quality and the maximum speed.
Let's see what the new product is like from both the exterior and the interior.
As was already stated, GeForce GTX 295 is some sort of a black "brick". On the front side of the video card, the are three video outputs – two Dual-Link DVI and one HDMI. Unusually, the vent holes are located under the DVI connectors, not above them.
There is nothing remarkable on the front side of the video card except the Zotac's proprietary sticker, let alone the soft-touch cover of the housing. That is why the video card is nice to hold in your hands.
On the reverse side of the video card, we can see the same hole for the turbine's cooler through which the air is sucked in, as well as a number of finer items of the surface assembly. Evidently, the most exciting items – GPU and memory chips - are hidden inside.
On the upper edge of the video card, there are two connectors for additional power supply of the video card and the "exhaust" hole of the cooler opened with no lid. There is a reasonable tradeoff between the rotational speed of the cooler and its noise level. If we draw the heated air in a traditional way – along the card trough the grid on the front panel outside the housing, it would require to increase the RPMs of the cooler substantially, which will inevitably result in the rise of the noise level. At the same time, such powerful video cards are normally installed into systems of matching level where the matter of cooling the interior space has already been solved, and the expulsion of part of the heated air by the video card inside will not result in a substantial change in the temperature balance.
Once we are talking about the cooling of the video card, we start introduction to the interior arrangement of the video card from exploring the cooler's design.
The cooler is some sort of a "sandwich" made up of two aluminum feet with copper cores having heat pipes pressed in, along which heat from the GPU is transferred to the cooling fins located inside the "sandwich".
Thermal contact of the video memory chips and the cooler's feet is provided with thermal spacers. One more copper core on one of the cooler's sides is meant to provide cooling of the switching chip of the PCI Express bus.
The turbine in the "tail" of the cooler sucks air from both sides of the video card and runs it through the cooling ribs. Part of the air, as was stated above, runs into the housing through the upper edge of the cooler, with the other part of the heated air running through the side of the video card where connectors are located, and expelled outside.
The card itself is made up of two halves, on each of which there is one video processor and a matching kit of video memory chips. The PCB design is almost identical, with the difference being only in the left-hand part. On the "half" of GeForce GTX 295 where there is the PCI-Express 16x connector, there is an HDMI connector, a switch of the PCI-E bus, and a NV-Link connector to merge video cards into the Quad-SLI combination, and two DVI connectors on the second one.
On the reverse side, there are no remarkable items on both the "halves".
GeForce GTX 295 bears two GT200b graphic processors made following the 55-nm process technology and not 65-nm like in the previous revisions. As was stated above, their nominal frequencies are identical to the operating frequencies of GT200 set on GeForce GTX 260. But there is one important distinction – the number of streaming processors has not undergone reduction, so each of the GPUs installed have all the 240 computational blocks as it is in the full-featured GTX 280.
Each of the GPUs is equipped with 896 MB of video memory. This capacity is made up of 14 DDR3 chips with 1.0 ns access time and the nominal frequency 1000 MHz (2000 MHz DDR) made by Hynix. This is the nominal frequency the video memory runs. Certainly, the width of the memory bus is 448 bit.
The NVIDIA NF200-P-SLI chip is a switching chip of the PCI Express 2.0 bus.
The NVIDIA NVIO2 chip contains RAMDAC and TDMS blocks and provides image output to the displays.
 Let's make some interim conclusions. In terms of design, the GeForce GTX 295 is very similar to GeForce 9800GX2 - it is the same "sandwich" with the cooler positioned in the middle of the cooler. Like its predecessor, the new "dual-headed" GeForce GTX 295 comprises two "halves" merged into the SLI with interior cables. Each of the parts is equipped with the GT200b graphic processor whose operating frequencies and the memory bus width coincide with the GPU settings defined on GeForce GTX 260 video cards. However, the number of streaming processors in the GPU of GeForce GTX 295 amounts to 240 pieces as it is in the higher-end model - GeForce GTX 280. Evidently, due to this combination of factors the performance of one "half" the GeForce GTX 295 should be positioned approximately between GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280. Therefore, the performance of GeForce GTX 295 in full operation should be a bit higher than the performance of GeForce GTX 260 SLI and a bit lower than that for GeForce GTX 280 SLI. We'll now find out how these expectations are justified.
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