Today is the launch date of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280. The card is designed to be the fastest graphics card available on the market today, and should also be able to beat the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the GeForce 9800 GX2. Point of View's GeForce GTX 280 follows the specifications of the NVIDIA reference design to the letter. However, to give their product an extra boost versus the many other reference design cards out there, Point of View has included the just recently released game Assassin's Creed. Buyers of their card get this successful game at no extra cost. This GeForce GTX 280 Assassin's Creed edition costs $649, just like all the other GeForce GTX 280 cards released today. - techPowerUp

Point of View GeForce GTX 280 Version Card Review

NVIDIA's new GT200 chip is very similar to the G80 architecture, but numerous improvements have been made. Although compared to the G80, the number of clusters has been increased from eight to ten. Also the number of streaming multi-processors went from two to three. The number of streaming processors has remained the same at eight. In total this results in almost double the amount of stream processors with 240 versus 128 on the last generation. The render backend has also been beefed up somewhat. Instead of four partitions, the GT200 now uses eight. This effectively doubles the available memory bandwidth.

Point of View has designed the package in a way to ensure that the buyers will notice the included bundle instantly. But now we find it hard to recognize the package as a GeForce GTX 280 card. On the back of the box you will find a multi-language text that tells you why this card is not only the latest but also the greatest. Except for the sticker on the cooler, the card is identical to the other GeForce GTX 280 cards launched today. The reason is that for newly released cards NVIDIA will not allow any physical changes to their reference design. Point of View's GeForce GTX 280 requires two slots in your PC which is common.

Like on all recent high-end cards from NVIDIA, the cooler is a quite complex piece of technology. The main cooling assembly uses a copper base to move the heat away from the GPU as fast as possible. As you can see by looking at the white thermal pads, the front cooler cools NVIO, GPU, eight memory chips and seven voltage regulators. The back plate is made from painted metal and cools the eight memory chips on the other side of the card. Also this full metal cover helps protect the PCB from any damage. The SLI connector is hidden behind a rubber cover. You can combine up to three cards in SLI to get even more.

This NVIDIA massive GT200 chipset, comes with 1.4 billion transistors in a 65 nm process. Although its die size makes it the biggest and most expensive GPU produced to date. Please note that the metal you see is not the GPU die, but the heatspreader on top of it. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix. Hynix rates those chips at 2400MHz, or better known as 0.83ns cycle time. This is the fasted GDDR3 memory variant available from Hynix. Just like the GeForce 9800 GX2, the GeForce GTX 280 is very difficult to disassemble. Please be advised that taking the card apart will most probably leave marks behind.

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 280 cards are the fastest on the market today, period. Without a doubt the performance is really impressive, but the price is equally as high. When looking at this card purely from a performance to price standpoint it is about the worst on the market today. However, some people want that performance, no matter the cost. Some people might even get three of them just to be number one in the benchmark competitions again. The high cost was to be expected though. An additional cost factor is the 512-bit memory bus which requires a more complex PCB design than a traditional 256-bit bus.

With this all-out design approach NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 280 achieved amazing benchmark scores, because it does not suffer from the limitations that current multi-GPU designs have. NVIDIA did a great job reducing the idle power consumption of their latest product, also the fan is quieter than other high-end cards. An extra plus that NVIDIA marketing emphasizes is that this card is for more than just gaming, you can do all sorts of calculations on the GPU and GPU accelerated PhysX will be available for these cards soon as well. However, at the moment we do not see the killer application for GPU accelerated computing yet.

When comparing these cards against each other price to performance wise the GeForce GTX 280 from Point of View comes out top and overclocking is easy anyway for free extra performance. One very nice addition is also the included Assassin's Creed game which was released not long ago and is one of the hottest games at the moment. Overall the GeForce GTX 280 is the fastest card money can buy you, and you will need a lot of money.