It's been a while since we have had one of those horrible launches, but it doesn't come as a surprise that NVIDIA are the first to have one after all this time. Over the past two weeks there's been a war between NVIDIA and AMD in regards to NDA times on the Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 275 graphics cards. We've had Radeon HD 4890 samples coming in for a few weeks now. So with that said, we chose not to test the card straight away, because as we draw closer to NDA we see new drivers come out. The Radeon HD 4890 was originally set to release two days before the GeForce GTX 275, and ATI then put their pedal down some more and it was released almost a week early than expected. - TweakTown

Gainward GeForce GTX 275 Graphics Version Review

In response to this, NVIDIA pulled their NDA forward to the day after the Radeon HD 4890's new launch. And while this was all happening, the Radeon HD 4890 samples were in hand but GeForce GTX 275 ones hadn't shipped yet. Three days before the NDA was up on the GeForce GTX 275, three companies confirmed that NVIDIA made a last minute change to the memory clock and decided to drop it, hence the delay for samples. Apart from a few reference cards, this was going to be a paper launch, which was just something that we had not become accustomed to seeing. Finally, let's see exactly what's going on with it.

Looking at the package, we don't see anything too different. Though we have seen Gainward use this design for a bit now. Across the top of the box we can clearly see the brand while moving down we can see a number of NVIDIA logos along with the mention of 3DMark Vantage. Across the bottom we can see the model, which is of course the GeForce GTX 275. We can see it packs 896MB of GDDR3 memory and some of the main features are mentioned like DirectX 10, dual DVI and more. Turning the box over, we have a bit more information on the features and technology that is implemented into the graphics card to enjoy.

Gainward has opted for the dual fan cooler that we've seen on a few cards from them now. It manages to take up the whole card, not letting us see a whole lot of anything else. Now looking closely behind the fans, we can see the heatpipes, aluminum fins along with some signs of copper. This is a really nice cooler that has proved to perform well in the past and hopefully it continues to do a good job on the GeForce GTX 275. At the back of the card we have two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors that are needed to power it. We also have two SLI connectors which gives us the ability to run up to three of these bad boys together.

Did NVIDIA need to release this video card? Yes and no, they ultimately needed something that sits in the same price range as the Radeon HD 4890. Having a look online at the real pricing of these cards, we can see that the Radeon HD 4890 does come in cheaper than the GeForce GTX 275. This GeForce GTX 275 however, is really consistently faster, so does this mean it would be the better choice? Well, not really. But if you want to game at on those 30inch displays the GeForce GTX 275 is just able to cut it for the most part, but if you've got such a monitor then hopefully you can get a graphics card like the GeForce GTX 295.

At lower widescreen resolutions both cards are pretty playable in most games, so why spend the extra money buying a GeForce GTX 275? The main reason is that you can run your games with slightly more detail. At the end of the day, the Radeon HD 4890 is for the most part slightly slower at playable resolutions and slightly cheaper. What we have are two cards that ultimately represent the same value for money. If you can spend a bit more and want a bit more performance which will let you have slightly more detail, then the GeForce GTX 275 is a good choice. Less detail, and cheaper then the Radeon HD 4890 is the better choice.

What we would have preferred to see is NVIDIA drop the pricing on the GeForce GTX 285 to combat the Radeon HD 4890 instead of offering another new model. What it all comes down to though, is we have a nice card and Gainward has mixed it up a bit with the cooler. Now we need some overclocked models to see what the card is really capable of. There's no reason why when overclocked it won't be able to take down a stock GeForce GTX 285 accelerator.