NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Preview @ [H]

kuyaglen said:
I look forward to the final evaluation of the retail cards. I liked your initial preview of your experiences with the card being quieter and cooler than the X2.

So does air also blow out from the top?
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Yes, from the back bracket and the "top" or "side" however you want to look at it. Right where the metal fins from the heatsink are showing, hot air gets blown out of there.
 
SO I guess nvidia figured that the idea is to get the hot air away from the card, period, no matter where it goes. It should be interesting to see if there will be any waterblocks made for these, given the weird placement of the PCB's.
 
Modred189 said:
SO I guess nvidia figured that the idea is to get the hot air away from the card, period, no matter where it goes. It should be interesting to see if there will be any waterblocks made for these, given the weird placement of the PCB's.
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There will allways be waterblocks made for everything made. :p
 
Seems like a rush job to me,Nvidia is playing catch-up.At best it might be equal to the 4870x2,it certainly doesn't blow it away.And given their track record with X2 cards,Nvidia will probably abandon it anyway,so what's the point?
 
alg7_munif said:
What they should do is, use a technology that can make a multi GPU card work as if it is a single GPU card.
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Lucid Hydra :)

On the subject of the GTX 295...meh. I didn't expect a 4870 X2 killer in any respects, but I did expect to see a more solid showing from NVIDIA. What we seem to have here is a "why would I buy this versus a 4870 X2?" situation.

I like what NVIDIA's done this generation on the single-GPU front, but SLi, and their whole multi-GPU approach altogether (stop with the silly PCB sandwiches already), leaves so much to be desired. If I were buying a single-GPU card today, it'd still be the GTX 280, but if you were to ask me what multi-GPU card I'd prefer to have in my system, it's without a doubt the 4870 X2.

 
I stand corrected then Brent :)

It's just that at Bit-tech and Hardware Canucks they have commented that there is a possibility that the GTX 295 could be priced under the 4870X2. However I do live in the EU so price structure etc will differ.

Having said that it is only a rumour and I personally am predisposed to believing [H] rather than the questionable veracity of the other sites.

Many thanks for the excellent preview! Keep it up :D
 
phide said:
but if you were to ask me what multi-GPU card I'd prefer to have in my system, it's without a doubt the 4870 X2.
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Umm... why? Exactly what is better on the 4870x2? At the moment the reviews are saying they are pretty near equal depending on game why is the 4870x2 "without a doubt" the better choice?
 
As the 4870X2 and 285 are practically neck and neck in the performance race it comes down to the following :


-Heat and Noise
-Power Usage (Watts)
-Driver Shenanigans


Forum wise, I read of more people having problems with ATI drivers than I do Nvidia drivers. And I trust SLI more than I trust Crossfire in the driver department. Especially where new games are concerned.

But if one gets real hot and blows like a hairdryer, then I'll choose the other.

Ive not exactly heard that the 4870x2's run cool and quiet.. so NVidia... I hope you wont let me down!
 
Did I see this correctly? Not only the card dumps the hot air out of the back of the case, it also dumps some of it right back in the case. Not a good solution imo.




I hope that [H] would do their review inside a case or at least mention that the review is done without a case because I'm sure that the temperature will be affected if the heat is dumped back into the case.
 
trudude said:
I think I am just gonna sit on my 4870 and maybe add a second one at some point for crossfire. I can wait until the real nextgen stuff comes out. This really is a drag though cause I was hoping for some monster GPU to put in my new i7 build that is coming up soon. Damnit Foxconn release the damn Bloodrage already heh...
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can never please them all. users complained that there wasn't a true successor to the 8800gtx for a year and a half. now with gtx 2xx and 48xx on the market for no more than 7 months, users are crying for the 'next big thing' to replace the last 'next big thing' that is only a few months old. has anyone read any of the latest gameplay evaluations. with the exception of gta4, everything's playable at 19x12 or beyond.
 
vengence said:
At the moment the reviews are saying they are pretty near equal depending on game why is the 4870x2 "without a doubt" the better choice?
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I think I can sum it up with the following: 9800 GX2. How can I be confident that NVIDIA doesn't intend the same future for the GTX 295 as they did for the GX2 (in other words, a practically non-existent future)? Since its release, AMD's been supporting the 4870 X2 admirably.

Besides which, I can only assume that the 295 suffers somewhat more from microstutter than the 4870 X2 which has shown to fare pretty well.
 
Wow you guys really proved that you're Nvidia fanboys in this review. Pretty much every page was putting Ati down. Crysis gameplay experience was much better on the GTX 295, even though the 4870X2 has nearly identical framerates? Sounds like bullshit to me.

And what's this about?

The Radeon HD 4870 took a commanding lead in performance over the GTX 295; almost a 43% lead in performance! Read on to the conclusion to find out what this means if anything.
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¬_¬
 
alg7_munif said:
Did I see this correctly? Not only the card dumps the hot air out of the back of the case, it also dumps some of it right back in the case. Not a good solution imo.

I hope that [H] would do their review inside a case or at least mention that the review is done without a case because I'm sure that the temperature will be affected if the heat is dumped back into the case.
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That's what case fans are for? This card was not meant for some itty bitty SFF boxputer. The cooling from the pics looks much more serious and effective overall. Who knows if it will it be on the final version though?

I vote this pic for the best badassery involving an oem video card heatsink.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIyOTU5MDAzNXNjRFphWklyZjJfMV8xMl9sLmpwZw==
 
Itsabird said:
Wow you guys really proved that you're Nvidia fanboys in this review. Pretty much every page was putting Ati down. Crysis gameplay experience was much better on the GTX 295, even though the 4870X2 has nearly identical framerates? Sounds like bullshit to me.

And what's this about?

The Radeon HD 4870 took a commanding lead in performance over the GTX 295; almost a 43% lead in performance! Read on to the conclusion to find out what this means if anything.
Click to expand...


¬_¬
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I didn't think it was that biased, they did say that both cards provided a amazing experience.

BTW check the sticky 'cause you have to be careful.
 
Itsabird said:
Wow you guys really proved that you're Nvidia fanboys in this review. Pretty much every page was putting Ati down. Crysis gameplay experience was much better on the GTX 295, even though the 4870X2 has nearly identical framerates? Sounds like bullshit to me.

And what's this about?



¬_¬
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Are you kidding me? I came out of this review believing that the ATI 4870 X2 is the better choice between the two. Only real game that seemed to have given the 295 a lead over the 4870 X2 was due to graphic related bugs...

And I'm sorry but your quote is misleading at best, it sounds exactly like what a good author for any multi-page article would do... That is, keep the reader interested in reading to the end to see if all the facts brought to them were of any true impact or not, and not to have the page or so before last as being the final say... That would make the conclusion utterly useless to some readers....
 
vengence said:
A while. Die sizes and failure rates would be horrible. Also you gain some thermal benefits to cooling by having them on seperate dies.
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Might be a while for true dual core but there's a rumour that the 5870X2 will be two dies on the same package ala C2Qs and Pentium-Ds.
 
Good thoughtful article.

Overclocked GTX 260 SLi is definitely a better option, particularly since you no longer must have an nVidia platform to run it. You may add to this that many GTX 260 cards seem to be shipping with Core 216 GPUs. Both of my 220usd "vanilla" EVGA GTX 260s came like that.
 
Promii said:
Might be a while for true dual core but there's a rumour that the 5870X2 will be two dies on the same package ala C2Qs and Pentium-Ds.
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I just don't see it with the already high failure rate on chips. Now if you make 8 chips and 4 are bad you still end up with 4 good cards. If you make 4 cards each with 2 chips, you're going to get 1 good card, 2 with 1 bad core, and 1 with 2 bad cores, you only end up with 1 good out of 8, I don't see how this could be a good thing.
 
Derfman said:
Are you kidding me? I came out of this review believing that the ATI 4870 X2 is the better choice between the two.
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+1
That's what I got. That the GTX2995 is a nice card, decently priced, but for most folks, it's worth it to save the difference and get the X2. But then again, some of us see the world with rose tinted glasses... or some other such deep quote...
 
When the hell will NVIDIA stop castrating the memory on their "GX2" cards? They'd also benefit from getting the clock speeds of the GPUs inline with the higher end single GPU cards. NVIDIA's 4-GPU scaling has also been notoriously bad up to this point. I'm wondering if sticking with 3 Geforce GTX 280 OC's in 3-Way SLI wouldn't actually perform damn close if not better than 2 of these things in Quad-SLI.
 
now that i've looked at some other reviews, it seems like you couldn't go wrong with this or a 4870x2. Cost is still a factor. I would like to see this against SLI setups ranging from 260s on up. Some multi-card 295 benchies would be great to see as well.
 
Brent_Justice said:
well that is certainly an interest of mine as well :)
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I'm a little more gun shy of "GX2" cards. I had two (I still have one) 9800GX2's in Quad-SLI and they didn't handle AA as well as my 3-Way SLI 8800GTX setup did. Plus I ended up with stuttering issues periodically which I had never had on any SLI system previous to using those cards. Other games I found the 9800GX2 to give higher "technical" frame rates but a worse gaming experience. I had sold most of my 8800GTX's to mitigate the cost of the 9800GX2 upgrade and I was dissappointed. I do not want to "upgrade" from 3 Geforce GTX 280 OC cards in 3-Way SLI to something that really turns out to be not much of an upgrade at all.

So as I said I'm a bit gun shy this time around.
 
Is the cooling system where it exhausts warm air into the interior of the case the same as the 9800GX2 or is that something new with this card?
 
Dan, Brent:
What size screens/resolutions do you guys use on a day to day basis?
 
Modred189 said:
Dan, Brent:
What size screens/resolutions do you guys use on a day to day basis?
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I use a Dell 3007WFP which is a 30" LCD. I run it at its native resolution of 2560x1600 for everything. General desktop use and for gaming.
 
Dan_D said:
When the hell will NVIDIA stop castrating the memory on their "GX2" cards? They'd also benefit from getting the clock speeds of the GPUs inline with the higher end single GPU cards.
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I totally agree. The GTX295 looks like a very well-designed card and would be a worthy single card solution for the uber-res gamers but the cutback on the memory is really a bitch. If it had 1GB of memory per GPU on the 512-bit bus it would be a beast of a card but, as it stands, it seems to be held back. Boosted clock speeds would be good too but I think that the hampered memory system is holding the card back more than the clock speeds.


Thanks for the preview Brent and Kyle....I'm looking forward to the full review.
 
So the SP's of GTX280 sli, but the memory bus and amount of a GTX 260 sli?

Would love to see this compared to a GTX260 & GTX280 SLI and see how that combination compares.

As well of how good it OC's.
 
Only thing holding it back is that memory, Nvidia should just experiment and toss in some of that ddr5 memory.
 
Well, nvidia have grabbed the headlines and attention of people so mission accomplised, however, i am wondering how many of these are going to be available for supply and demand reasons and if this is stretching what they are capable of.

People are wanting higher clocks, more memory or different memory but it ain't going to happen most likely, especially the last two.

Still, as with the x2, these cards make sense for those wanting a single slot solution. It will come down to games and preferred level of eye candy.
 
I'm crazy apparently, don't know where I got display port from, the connector is HDMI. It still stands though, can drive 3 displays in multi-mon mode from the card. Fixed.
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i was hoping for a little clarification on that point. you wrote (in the revised version):

The GTX 295 requires one each 6-pin PCIe and one each 8-pin PCIe power connector. There is an exposed SLI bridge on the video card for Quad-SLI support. You will find dual-link DVI ports on board as well as an HDMI connector. When SLI is disabled, (in Multi-Monitor mode) you will be able to drive three displays from this single video card using the DVI ports and the HDMI port. In SLI mode, only two displays are supported at this time.
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can i assume that this means quad-SLI will disable the HDMI port, but a single GTX 295 will drive three monitors and still function as "SLI on a single device"?
 
Sweet, one of the few sites to actually have some numbers, great hustle :). I have to say I'm not impressed with the card though. It took NVIDIA about four months to come up with something of equivalent performance of ATI's 4870X2. Maybe drivers will improve the card, but I won't hold my breath. However, I'm definitely interested in the power and overclocking numbers when the NDA is lifted.
 
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