The EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Hydro Copper 16 is overclocked out of the box and uses water cooling to help keep things nice and cool. Today, we have a couple GeForce GTX 280’s to show you and they are two very different cards. This card still has good price versus performance, but has a reduced number of processing cores (192 instead of 240) and lower frame buffer size (896MB instead of 1024MB). If that is a bit too pricey, the crew over at NVIDIA have the $449 GeForce GTX 260. The MSRP of one of these monseters is $649 for the stock-clocked GeForce GTX 280 video card. It has 240 processing cores and 1GB of GDDR3 frame buffer memory running on a wider 512-bit memory bus.
NVIDIA claims the GeForce GTX 280 will deliver an impressive 1.5x performance improvement on average over high-end GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 series single-GPU graphics boards, which makes it the fastest single-gpu board on they have ever produced. These cards use NVIDIAs second-generation unified visual computing architecture and are more than just a polish of existing products.
This morning, NVIDA has announced the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics boards, which are part of the just announced GeForce GTX 200 GPU family and powered by the new GT200 GPU.
As you can see from the chart above the GeForce GTX 280 has 87.5% more cores (stream processors), double precision and huge increases in floating point bandwidth Since most consumers are not GPU experts lets compare the main features of the GeForce 8800 GTX from 2006 to the just released GeForce GTX 280. With that said, it is time for GeForce 8800 GTX owners to think about upgrading because after you read this you will be wanting to. Anyone that bought a GeForce 8800 GTX back in 2006 and paid an arm and a leg for it should pat themselves on the back as they bought a video card that lasted well into 2008.
Those that bought the GeForce 8800 GTX back in November 2006 had a card that was still faster in many applications and had no real reason to upgrade unless they wanted the new video processor or better power consumption numbers. By the time April 2008 came around the GeForce 9800 GTX it was yet another G92 based product and many enthusiasts were not impressed. The GeForce 9800 GX2 was launched in March 2008 and was the fastest card on the market, but wasn’t really innovative as it was again just a couple GeForce 8 series cores on a new board. When the NVIDIA GeForce 9 series of graphics cards launched back February 2008 with the GeForce 9600 GT leading the way, many enthusaists didn’t see the performance jump they were used to seeing and saw the series as a polished GeForce 8 GPU with a new name.
FREE BUNDLE: Special Edition EVGA Precision overclocking utility included with every EVGA GTX 280/260!Ĭlick here to learn about the EVGA GTX 280 HC Click here to learn about the EVGA GTX 280 Hydro Copper 16 Waterblock