GeForce GTX 280 coverage round-up

Posted at: Monday 16th June 2008 by Alex Watson

Everything you need to know about Nvidia's brand new high-end GPU

The wait for GeForce 10 is over - although Nvidia has ditched its traditional naming scheme, so its new high-end GeForce GPU is actually called the GeForce GTX 280. It's an enormous chip that packs in 1.4 billion transistors to give 240 stream processors,a huge 512-bit wide memory interface and consequently it puts out enough heat to warm your feet by on cold winter evenings.


This article is intended to be a one-stop piece rounding up all the coverage you need.

* Here's our review of the GeForce GTX 280.
* If you just want the numbers, go straight to our performance benchmarks (opens in a new window).
* Here's a video of us taking a GeForce GTX 280 apart so you can see what lurks beneath its huge double slot cooler.
* We've also taken a closer look at Nvidia's new naming scheme, and its potential problems.
* And finally, if you want to buy one of these new cards, we've listed a selection of the best prices available on the web.


We've also rounded up the best of the reviews from the rest of the web - and we'll add to these as more reviews go up:

* Tech Report: 'What you make of the GeForce GTX 280 may hinge on where you come down on the multi-GPU question. Clearly, the GTX 280 is far and away the new single-GPU performance champ, and Nvidia has done it again by nearly doubling the resources of the G80. Its performance is strongest, relatively speaking, at high resolutions where current solutions suffer most, surely in part because of its true 1GB memory size. And one can't help but like the legion of tweaks and incremental enhancements Nvidia has made to an already familiar and successful basic GPU architecture, from better tuning of the shader cores to the precipitous reduction in idle power draw..' (No score given)

* Tom's Hardware (US): 'The new very-high-end GTX 280 from Nvidia ($650) suffers a little from comparison with the 9800 GX2, which regularly bested its performance in tests, despite the inherent and irremediable drawbacks of bi-GPU cards. But in reality, the real threat is from the card’s “little sister,” the GTX 260, especially since the price will almost buy you two GTX 260s to run in SLI!.' (No score given)