Buying a video card can be a tricky thing. There are just so many on the market made by so many brands that it is very difficult to know which board is truly the best for your needs. Many cards are so similar to others that it can make your decision overwhelming. Add to that the fact that new cards are constantly being developed, making graphics devices one of the quickest computer components to become outdated. Most likely, the card you choose will already be outdated, unless you intend to spend hundreds of dollars on the current best thing. Though for most of us, a mid-level graphics card at a reasonable price will suit our needs just fine. And not very long ago, one of $150 was the best around. - TestFreaks
While the release of the GeForce GTX 295 card back in January regained NVIDIA the crown of fastest single graphics board. The GeForce GTX 295 hasn't been the success it perhaps could have been, with high production costs due to their dual PCB design keeping prices close to $500 and out of the reach for many. So with AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 priced around $125 cheaper and offering comparable performance in many games, it is hard to look beyond the red team. However, all isn't lost for NVIDIA's latest dual GPU monster, with the GeForce GTX 295 having just received an significant redesign six months into its life cycle which is aimed at slashing production costs and making it much more competitive. - Bit-Tech
Now we saw Sapphire really mix it up recently with this Radeon HD 4890 Atomic version of these graphics cards. The company hasn't stopped there though, now choosing to do even more with the model. ATI partners really don't have the range of graphics cards to play with like NVIDIA ones. What this means is that we tend to see companies offer more variants of the same model. These Radeon HD 4890 have always been a pretty impressive cards. While it was never the holder of the performance crown, it did manage to offer some serious value for money and for so many people this is more important than an super fast graphics card that they can't afford. Which is really what it is all about to sell more. - TweakTown
It really does seem weird to be looking at models which are considered quite old now. The funny thing is that while these GeForce GTS 250 might have been out for a while, it's still a very current model. And a few years ago this wouldn't have been much of a surprise, but with the recent releases of so many cards over the past eighteen months it just seems funny that the GeForce GTS 250 card is still a very current model. Today we'll be looking at a card from Inno3D and like most companies they've really been able to mix it up because of the age of the card. The biggest advantage to working with cards that have been around for a while now is that there are plenty of options when it comes to cooling. - TweakTown
Like most NVIDIA models, the GeForce GTX 285 is beginning to feel a bit long in the tooth. While there is really nothing wrong with the card, it feels like we've been testing these models for ages now. We went from these rapid releases of graphics cards that saw models coming out once a month to nothing new for an extensive period. That doesn't mean we can't see companies mix models up and this is what Gigabyte has done. By doubling the memory on their GeForce GTX 285 from 1GB to 2GB, Gigabyte hopes to make this model a bit more exciting. And there is more than meets the eye though. With the 2GB model also comes higher clock speeds and slighly improved PCB manufacturing. - TweakTown
Most technology companies have made reasonable efforts to do their bit for the environment. Low power CPU's, memory modules, graphics cards and even hard drives have cropped up in the last year, to the extent that an article is now just incomplete with rudimentary powerdraw readings. Going toward the very high-end of the market however and energy usage becomes subservient to sheer visceral power. In terms of present graphics cards that pertains to the GeForce GTX 295 and Radeon HD 4870 X2 editions. Launched at the beginning of the year, the twin GPU powered GeForce GTX 295 took the performance crown back. In an effort to reduce costs, we're seeing a few single PCB based versions turning up. - Hexus
The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 video cards have been out for quite a while now. With that passage of time comes the realization that this old workhorse needs a little pep to keep delivering the same performance as games continue to evolve and demand more and more processing power. And offering factory overclocked cards is one way of giving a refresh to a true performer. Some manufacturers just give a small bump to the GPU and call it an overclock model and leave it at that. Others take a few steps further with improvements on all the clock speeds and a marginally better cooling solution, while only a few go whole hog and slap on an massive heatsink along with much higher clock speeds. - Overclockers Club
The high-end graphics market has grown stale with flagship products from both NVIDIA and ATI being now old news. So while we wait for each camp to bring new GPU's to the market, Gigabyte opted to send us a mid-range GeForce 9800 GT, but unlike any other GeForce 9800 GT you've ever seen before. Rather than to stick with the reference cooling solution, Gigabyte's Silent Cell version earns its moniker with a monster sized fanless heatsink, making it the only passively cooled GeForce 9800 GT in existence. But that isn't the only thing the Silent Cell has going. Following the more is better mantra, Gigabyte doubled the amount of memory found on most GeForce 9800 GT cards to 1GB size. - HardwareLogic
When the time comes to buy a new graphics card we all have our wants that are tempered with our needs. This usually comes down to the price we ultimately put as the limit for the purchase. And many times the needs will win out with some reasoning and we buy a model just lower than we want. So then we will spend some money to make improvements to the cooling to try and overclock to reach a higher level of performance for the dollars we spent. What if a manufacturer has added a cooler that was capable of meeting the cooling needs right out of the box with a price tag that was reasonable? Would you allow the want to override the need, since you have plans for additional cooling? - Overclockers Club
Just last week we took a look at another card from MSI, the GeForce GTX 260 and it proved to be a great card. This week we will looking at another video card from MSI, one with some similarities being their GeForce GTX 275 Twin Frozr. And while the worldwide economic nosedive has been mostly terrible for many things, one of these partial silver linings has been a lowering of hardware prices across the board. It's not all that long ago where a mid-range video board could reasonably cost you around $250 now it is a completely different ballgame. With graphics cards around $100 mark are capable of handling today's games, while cards closer to $250 mark are right near the highest performance. - NeoSeeker
Microsoft's Xbox 360 runs on an custom ATI graphics chipset that's based on the Radeon X1800 series and Sony's PlayStation 3 has an NVIDIA based chip that's essentially a GeForce 7800 from some years ago. Meanwhile these GPU's from NVIDIA for the PC have had two full generations of graphics re-architecturing, the first in the form of the G80 architecture that powers the GeForce 8800 series and the second in one of it's latest chips, the massive GT200 chipset. And the same does count for ATI really which has also evolved with their technology. Now this means that these current computers can be equipped with some serious power. Who ever said PC gamers didn't have it better than console gamers? - PCStats
GLY GTX275 (OC) PCIe 0896MB - Rev 01
