There's been something of a trend in the computer component industry over the last few years with both Intel and NVIDIA ruling the roost in terms of CPU and graphics card performance respectively. Meanwhile AMD has gone through a bit of a rough patch but has recently come back strong with some competitively priced products that, while perhaps not the fastest, have proved to be worthwhile investments nonetheless. The one exception was the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card that actually proved to be at least equal and faster than NVIDIA's then top range card, the GeForce GTX 280. The obvious problem for ATI was that it had already needed to meld two chips onto one board. - TrustedReviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Dual GT200 Version Review

Now officially launched at CES, the GeForce GTX 295 is NVIDIA's latest top-end graphics card and, as that preamble will have suggested to you, it uses two GeForce GTX 280 chips working together in a single card to theoretically hand the competition its own proverbials. In actual fact, the GeForce GTX 295 isn't quite two fully fledged GeForce GTX 280's in so much as the clock speeds of the two chips have been lowered to the same as that of the GeForce GTX 260. Basically, the two cores run at 576MHz with the shader clock set to 1242MHz. The memory speed has also been reduced to 1998MHz effective.

As well as these speed reductions the other secret to enabling the GeForce GTX 295 to exist is the shrink in manufacturing process. The normal and actually old GeForce GTX 280 had been produced using a 65nm process, but the chips used in the GeForce GTX 295 card use a smaller 55nm process. This seemingly small reduction has a large cumulative affect on the overall power and heat output of the chip, enabling NVIDIA to fit the same computing power in a smaller thermal envelope than would otherwise be possible. The board itself takes a radically different approach to that of ATI's two chips on one single board.

Instead NVIDIA essentially creates two complete graphics cards in mirror image then sandwiches them together using a tasty heatsink fan filling. This design does raise the age old concern of heat being pumped back into the case rather than straight out the back, which can lead to overheating. However, when you're running a card that pumps out as much heat as this one does you simply have to accept that your case will need to be well ventilated so this shouldn't concern you too much. Despite the significant heat, the GeForce GTX 295's fan manages to be reasonably quiet, with though a gentle whoosh even at idle operation.

So, the GeForce GTX 295 is currently the fastest graphics card on the planet and it consumes less power than the competition. That would seem like a sure fire ticket to recommendation land then. Well yes, expect there's price to consider and even with the particular ASUS card we're looking at coming in a little cheaper than most GeForce GTX 295's, and it still costs a whopping $499, which is quite a staggering amount of money. However, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 video card has actually gone up in price since we checked it and when you do a rough price to performance comparison you'll see that, at least in the games we've tested.

The GeForce GTX 295 card averages out at giving you more performance for your money. So out of the two, it's a clear choice of which to go for. That said, we'd still say both are a little too expensive to ever recommend. NVIDIA has aimed for the gaming performance crown with the GeForce GTX 295 and it has certainly succeeded, though some of its victories have been modest. Most importantly though, NVIDIA has also regained the price to performance crown, making this the clear choice of ultra high-end graphics cards, though assuming you could ever consider spending $499 on a graphics card sensible.