We know that there are many of you are thinking right now, another new graphics card from NVIDIA? Yes, you got it guys, NVIDIA is on a mission to recapture the performance crown from the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and they are not being subtle about it. Their latest stab at this ultra high-end is called the GeForce GTX 295 and it is packing enough heat to put ATI's frontrunner in its place. This may be a bit been there, done that for those of you who read the preview a few weeks ago. This is where the rubber meets the road folks since we are expecting a finished product without the quirkiness found in the beta drivers used for the preview. And new final drivers have been released with this release. - Hardware Canucks

EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 Duo-GPU Graphics Review

So, what is this card all about? Basically, it consists of a pair of 55nm GeForce GTX 260 cards joined by an SLI connector which have been massaged to provide a little more performance through extra texture filter units and stream processors. These two cores are each paired up with 896MB of GDDR3 memory which puts it slightly below the 2GB of lightning fast GDDR5 found on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 but that shouldn't be too much of an issue performance wise. Pricing seems to have been set and while the GeForce GTX 295 was supposed to retail for around the same price as the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and it has indeed hit that point.

Usually we get an overclocked version of their cards at launch but this time it is a stock clocker as we have been told that there won't be any overclocked cards from any manufacturer at launch. This probably has something to do with the temperatures seen on the cores. One way or another, as usual you should feel confident looking at this EVGA card since they have some of the best customer service around, have a lifetime warranty on all of their cards and also offer their famous step-up program. We should also mention that from our experience we have usually found EVGA graphics cards to be among the least expensive.

There really isn't much to say about the packaging of the EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 since it is a literal mirror image of every other EVGA box we have seen in the past. It is predominantly black with a few red highlights and a massive EVGA logo. Meanwhile, the back of the box has very little information other than a picture of the card itself and the description of a few features. On the side of the box there is a mention of the 90-day step-up program but the real ringer is in bold letters right on the front of the box. Free PhysX, as indeed NVIDIA is trying to push PhysX far too hard these days and this really is too much now.

In the current video card performance arena, there haven't been many interesting developments for the last little while since both ATI and NVIDIA seemed to be content to stay the course with their current crop of contenders. The GeForce GTX 295 show us that NVIDIA is truly serious about recapturing the performance crown from ATI but the question that begs to be answered is did they succeed? We are going to have to say yes and no. The EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 board definitely seems to live up to the hype by displaying absolutely amazing rates in the most of the benchmarks which in itself would mean it is the fastest card?

Anyways, back to the GeForce GTX 295 and the growing pains associated with it since much like the Radeon HD 4870 X2, this card runs hot and it runs loud. Heat we can put up with to a certain extent but the noise this thing puts out even at idle is unacceptable to say the least. Its fan speed profile is far too aggressive but we guess that is what it takes to keep two GPU's cool. There is a lot to like about NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 but there are some major points of contention as well. If you are in the market for extremely good performance at ultra high resolutions with lifetime warranty, this card may be just what the doctor ordered.