Thread: GeForce GTX 295

The GeForce GTX 295 will be an all new dual-GPU graphics card from NVIDIA based on the 55nm GeForce GTX 200 derivatives.

With that knowledge in mind, today we'll present you a fairly deep preview of what's to come. NVIDIA will launch new 55nm parts at CES 2009 in Las Vegas, January 8th. Much like ATI did, NVIDIA also wanted to get an early engineering sample to some selected members of the press. Guru3D is one of the few websites allowed to publish a sneak peek, as heck... this stuff is really our cup of tea isn't it?

Since the board we received is an early production sample, the power management features were not yet finalized in the BIOS and drivers. So this preview will be very much focused on the physical product and of course its performance. The temperature delta, power consumption etc. we'll show you in the final review in early January.

Obviously we'll talk a little about what we are dealing with over the next few pages... do a nice photo shoot and then I'll grab the current leading game titles to see where we are performance wise with the GeForce GTX 295. Of course we'll compare it directly with the competing product from AMD, the mighty ATI Radeon 4870 X2, as the sole reason for the GTX 295 to even exist is that funky red colored dual-GPU based card from ATI.



The GTX 295 is a bit of a weird combo. See, it has the memory volume and frequency of two GTX 260 cards yet the raw shader processor horsepower of two GeForce GTX 280 cards.

Memory: 1792 MB (896 MB per GPU)
Shaders processor: 240 per GPU, 480 in total
Core frequency: 576 MHz (Texture and ROP units)
Shader processor: 1242 MHz

So that makes it a bit of a hybrid in between two GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards. One thing is a fact though, it's an awful lot of computing power for sure.

Quick note for the true geeks: Each GPU features seven ROP and framebuffer partitions. Each ROP partition contains four ROP units, providing each GPU with 28 ROP units. Each framebuffer partition is connected to 128 MB of memory, totalling 896 MB of video memory for each GPU, thus times two. Total number of Texture Filtering Units: 160 (80x2).

Power consumption: while we cannot disclose any definitive numbers based on our own tests, you can rest assured that when these two GPU's are fully utilized the card can peak towards 289 watts power consumption. It remains to be discussed for the final review, but the GPU is now made on a smaller 55nm fabrication node which typically ensures lower voltages and thus power consumptions and TDP. In the end I can tell you though that power consumption will be slightly lower than the competition's X2.

That's still a lot of power you are consuming though, which you can frown upon. There are obviously also a couple of very interesting positives. You are adding a MASSIVE amount of horse power to your PC. Seriously it's even a little crazy when you think about it. You have 2x 240 shader processor cores inside one graphics card, and as our previously published GTX 260/280 SLI results were already showing... that's a rather incredible amount of horsepower. The fun thing with the product now is that with that much power you can also have it handle future PhysX titles really easily without dedicating a GPU to PhysX, yet keep the raw horsepower the card really has. Heck, the more effects a game has, the better.



Some GeForce GTX 295 facts.



* Fabricated on a 55nm production node
* Two GTX 200 GPUs
* Accumulated 480 shader processors
* 576 MHz Core Clock frequency
* 1242 MHz Shader domain frequency
* 999 MHz DDR3 Memory frequency
* 2x 896 MB of memory = 1792 MB = 1.8 GB

So in layman's terms this graphics card has the memory configuration of the GTX 260, but the raw shader power of the GTX 280. And these two are then multiplied by a factor of two.




Some of you might wonder why NVIDIA decided not to use GDDR5 memory on this product, and that is a very valid question. Fact is that the GTX 200 memory controllers simply do not support GDDR5. So expect GDDR5 integration into the next generation GeForce graphics products.
GeForce
9800 GTX GeForce GTX
260 Core 216 GeForce GTX
280 GeForce GTX
295
Stream (Shader) Processors 128 216 240 240x2
Core Clock (MHz) 675 576 602 576
Shader Clock (MHz) 1675 1242 1296 1242
Memory Clock (MHz) x2 1100 999 1053 999
Memory amount 512 MB 896 MB 1024 MB 1792 MB
Memory Interface 256-bit 448-bit 512-bit 448-bit x2
HDCP Yes Yes Yes Yes
Two Dual link DVI Yes Yes Yes Yes

Cooling - though we cannot disclose numbers on noise and temperatures just yet (power management is not yet finalized) we can already tell you that we were at the very least impressed by its cooling. Face it, two GPUs generate a lot of heat, especially with a dual PCB design and a 289W TDP.

The cooling solution is, according to NVIDIA, capable of dissipating more than 289 watts of power. Compared to the 9800 GX2 you can spot the differences as you'll notice the sturdy meshed metal plating, which has a nice soft black finished look. Overall the cooling unit should be able to show gains up to 40, maybe 50% in cooling over the older solutions. And it looks and feels great.

Link:
GeForce GTX 295 preview

the card looks sleek.......

i want that card for sure.

OMG! :O......This must run really hot and probably will have a price tag of 1k here in Australia.

i saw that on eVga.... dammm

That card looks freaking massive... good god. It will only fit into the biggest of cabinets lolz

2 expensive ...ewwww

It will be a performer, but yes, expensive one :D

Better to wait till DX11 in GTX 3000