Today we are looking at a green, NVIDIA from Gainward, but this company isn't a stranger to ATI red either. A few days ago, Gainward publicly announced that they will be offering ATI graphics cards too. You can't blame them for supporting both camps, especially knowing that the new Radeon HD 4800 series cards offer great value for money, and this is something that's always on consumers' minds. AMD is finally doing well in the graphics field and in this business it's not a good idea to pass up an opportunity to rake in some dough. However, today we're not talking about Gainward's forbidden red fruit, but rather about its GeForce GTX 280 graphics card and its gaming performance. - FudZilla

Gainward GeForce GTX 280 1GB Video Board Review

Gainward's card is a full reference design, but this time they opted on a new blue sticker motif. That's all they could do because NVIDIA told their partners to strictly stick to reference cards for this launch. That resulted in an uninteresting launch where we've seen a bunch of identical GT200 based cards, but where's the fun in that? Overclocked cards are everywhere now, and a 700MHz is the holy grail when it comes overclocked GeForce GTX 280 cards. The name of the card, GeForce GTX 280, reveals that this is the better one out of two GT200 GPU's, where the weaker version is called GeForce GTX 260.

The GeForce GTX 280 packs no less than 240 shader processors, whereas the weaker card is, as usually, is a crippled version of the same card. This time the GeForce GTX 260 ended up having 192 shader processors. Gainward offers both cards, but currently there're no famous Golden Sample versions. The Gainward GeForce GTX 280 runs at reference 602MHz and 1296MHz for shaders, and the memory runs at 2214MHz effective. The GeForce GTX 280 features a frame buffer of 1GB of GDDR3 memory with 512bit memory bus. Unlike AMD, NVIDIA didn't opt for GDDR5 memory for their new high-end part.

So NVIDIA but simply upgraded to 512-bit memory bus that doubled the memory bandwidth. AMD was temporarily troubled by insufficient quantities of GDDR5, that's still an exotic item on the market. The GeForce GTX 280 features the largest graphics processor ever. It's built in 65nm and packs no less than 1400 million transistors. NVIDIA is currently working on a 55nm chip, that's supposed to be faster, but we won't be seeing it in the following weeks. NVIDIA is trying to put GT200's graphics processor to good use, whether it's rendering games or any other task. We hear the term beyond gaming more often these days.

It's not hard to see that the Gainward GeForce GTX 280 performs better than the Radeon HD 4870. Up until yesterday, we'd never recommend it to anyone, but now that the prices were adjusted and the GeForce GTX 280 cards are available for $399, we're already thinking about it. The real question is whether you need a card that's faster than the Radeon HD 4870, but if you do then look no further than the Gainward GeForce GTX 280. Its cooler is a bit too loud for our taste, but the card will run stable and put its 1400 million transistors to good use. And that means some great gaming experience which you can expect.

The VP2 video engine means that you can enjoy high definition video, and it will power down if your integrated graphics core can handle the job. If you've got a 24-inch screen, or if you're really luck and have something even bigger, this is the card to consider. Having said that, bare in mind that the upcoming R700, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 could end up even faster. So, at the new $399 price, this card is something you might want to check out. Gainward did a good job with the reference card, but as with all reference cards, a little overclocking would do no harm and will surely raise the performance.