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Gainward Single PCB GTX 295 Review
Author: Harry ButlerPublished: 10th August 2009
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Comments 1 to 26 of 39
The first thing I did when I saw the heatsink arrangement though was to wish we could get cards like this in a cheaper bare-bones format with no cooling system included, for those of us who would rather use after-market cooling on our cards.
Imagine how much cheaper the cards could be if supplied without the HSF. :(
Anyway, good review as usual, thanks :)
Shame that none of the places listing HD4870X2's at around the £230 mark have any stock.
...
Typo on page 10: "speeding up the fan to keep the GPU withib safe temperature limits." I'm guessing that should be 'within'. :)
I agree - in addition to this, surely the gold fingers on the PCB could get burned like that due to excessive current being pulled by a defective IC on the board, rather than customer abuse / mis-fitting? I understand that they need to protect themselves from paying out for cards that have been blatantly hacked, but their warranty is starting to look rather like those health insurance schemes that always find a reason not to pay out when things go wrong.
That aside it's still a nice card, and I'd definitely prefer one over the previous '2 PCB' design, given the better cooling performance on offer.
It's more towards 2x216 I'm afraid. Each core runs at the exact same speeds as a default GTX 260 (576MHz, 1242MHz, 999MHz (1998MHz effective)
2 GTX 275 in SLI would be noticeably faster.
However, the clock speeds muddy the water a lot. :(
The feedback we had from board partners was that the GTX 295 dual PCB was killing them on margin - it was so expensive to produce, but still had to compete with the HD 4870X2, which at one point was only £250! Hopefully this single PCB version should make everyone happy.
On the contrary, I'd say it's the epitome of a discrete graphics card. It's certainly not discreet, though... :)
£350? I'm in the market for a new mainboard [775] and a new graphics card but my total budget is far lower than that. I just don't see the point without a 24" FullHD-all-bells-and-whistles monitor.
OK, sorry; my bad.
To be honest, I'm not really that desperate for a single PCB variant.. not enough to lose the built in HDMI socket. The backplate also still takes up 2 openings, so what exactly is gained here? Plus, the fans now blow half of the exhausted air inside the case, rather than out of it.
As for overclocking, my crappy old 2 PCB version (with HDMI socket) can run happily at 740MHz. Any overclock test here is relative to whatever benchmark card you're testing against rather than a definitive test of overclocking ability.
As it's not massively cheaper than the "old" version.... I just fail to see the point in this product.
As I said in the article, one of the big points of this card was to cut production costs, the overall price of the card, and improve on cooling, all of which the card does. Calling it pointless is a little short sighted - in the long run this means better, cheaper dual GPU cards from Nvidia.
It was designed to increase Nvidia's profit margins, and provide an engineering solution for their dual DX 11 cards. Not to mention gaining some headlines for their flagship GPU, at a time when the 4870 X2 significantly undercuts the big N.
Ninja reply - Baz:)
Surely there's something up with this?
True this is a lets test the waters with a single pcb instead of waste a lot of research funds on a newer chip trying to achieve the same thing but then have to recall our new flagship from issues arising, if an issue happens on this card no biggie its already been out on the market for awhile so when they come out with the new dual single pcb gpu card it will look better from a marketing stand point.
Could be driver related but ya that big of a hit does seem a bit odd/.
That's just the early sample we received for review. The retail cards will come with board partner stickers as usual. Sorry if we got your hopes up!
Not sure which huge performance hit you're referring too - the HD 4870 X2 seems to take around a 10% performance hit when enabling 4xAA in Crysis or pretty much any other game.
Nothing a hairdryer can't fix.