Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 now on sale

Posted at: 4:05pm 15th January 2009 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia’s new flagship single-GPU graphics card is now out in the shops for less than £300

Following its early announcement at CES last week, Nvidia has now already released its 55nm GeForce GTX 285 GPUs, and a number of cards are already in stock with UK etailers.

The lowest price we could find was for a Zotac card at stock speeds on eBuyer, which cost just £294.99 inc VAT. However, there are also some overclocked cards doing the rounds. For example, Overclockers has a BFG card with a 712MHz core, a 1.62GHz shader clock and 1.332GHz (2,664MHz effective) memory memory available for pre-order, although it’s not cheap at £379.49 inc VAT. As standard, the GeForce GTX 285 has a 648MHz core clock, with 1.476GHz stream processors and 1.242GHz (2.484GHz effective) memory, plus a 512-bit memory interface.

ATI doesn’t have a direct competitor at this price point, as the Radeon HD 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 sit on either side of the GTX 285, with a difference of around £35 each way. However, the GTX 285 will still be up against some stiff competition. The Radeon HD 4850 X2 beat the GTX 280 in a number of games in our labs test in Issue 66 of Custom PC, although the GTX 285 is likely to be quicker than the 280 with its faster clock speeds.

The GTX 285 will also have some other benefits on its side. For a start, it has lower power requirements, meaning that it only requires two 6-pin power connectors, rather than the 6-pin and 8-pin duo required by most high-end cards, including the Radeon HD 4850 X2. Being a single-GPU graphics card, you also won’t have to worry about whether a game is optimised for SLI or CrossFire in order to get access to your card’s full performance.

Is £294.99 inc VAT a fair price for Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 285, assuming that it performs as expected, or would you rather have a Radeon HD 4800 X2 card? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.