Having so recently upgraded our personal computer to the Intel X58 chipset and Windows Vista, we were especially looking forward to checking out EVGA's top of the line GeForce GTX 295 graphics board. The GeForce GTX 295 is NVIDIA's latest and most powerful graphics processing unit, which is comprised of two GPU's in a single graphics card configuration. NVIDIA has plenty of experience with this type of product as the configuration was featured in their GeForce 9800 GX2 and their previous GeForce 7950 GX2. The GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295 are NVIDIA's first consumer based GPU's manufactured at a 55nm fabrication process, which was just a requirement for this dual GPU design. - nV News

EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus Design Version Preview

Now GPU's manufactured at lower fabrication processes typically contain more transistors, have higher clock speeds, consume less energy and generate less heat. The GeForce GTX 295 card looks to be a hybrid GPU designed to provide a balance between performance and power efficiency. Similar to the GeForce GTX 280 are the 480 stream processors and 160 texture filtering units while the 448-bit memory interface and 896MB of memory per GPU core are from the GeForce GTX 260. The graphics card is rather heavy and occupies two case slots. The top of the enclosure consists of an attractive aluminum casing, with vent holes.

With a GPU die shrink to 55nm, a stock GeForce GTX 295 will likely have a bit of headroom for overclocking. Based on past experience with NVIDIA based GPU's, a typical overclock with stock air cooling provides around ten percent increase in performance. We used their Precision tool to overclock the GeForce GTX 295 while the highest clock speeds were determined with FurMark's stress test. All of the overclocking benchmarks completed successfuly without any ill effects with the GPU running at 660MHz, shaders at 1440MHz and memory of 2500MHz. And this is a nice bump over the default clock speed settings.

Priced at $500, the EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 delivered average frame rates that were close to the GeForce 280 running in SLI config. At the time this article was published, the cheapest GeForce GTX 280 card is selling for $319. Two of them cost $638, which is a more expensive configuration right off the bat. With an SLI configuration, additional costs are possible as the purchaser may require an SLI enabled motherboard and really needs to consider the strength of their current power supply and the number of PCI Express connections available. So the power needed is somehow in favor of the dual GPU solution.

The one drawback of the EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 card is its lower amount of graphics memory, which as such can cause performance to degrade when an applications requires more. These cases were game and setting dependent and typically occurred at those ultra widescreen resolutions. Even so, the benefits that the EVGA GeForce GTX 295 provide at the high-end of the gaming spectrum earned our utmost recommendation.