After the setback inflicted upon them by ATI's Radeon 4800 series, NVIDIA has been slowly but surely picking themselves up. Sure, they were left floored by the sheer value for money proposition that ATI was touting, but like real men, they licked their wounds and soldiered on. Since then, they've been hard at work. Their GeForce GTX 295 stole the speed king crown from ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2 and with a new pricing strategy and improved products in the form of GeForce GTX 285 and GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, they gave gamers looking for high-end graphics solutions something to really think about. Though luckily for them, their choices of high-end card have just become a little more varied. - Hardware Zone

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 896MB Video Board Review

Like a never ending game of cat and mouse, the GeForce GTX 275 is NVIDIA's counter to the Radeon HD 4890, which we checked earlier. As its name implies, it fills the gap between the awesome GeForce GTX 285 and the GeForce GTX 260+ edition. It has 240 stream processors and a 448-bit memory bus width and its core is clocked at 633MHz, and whereas memory and shaders are clocked at 2268MHz and 1404MHz respectively. In a nutshell, the new GeForce GTX 275 is the lovechild of the former mentioned cards. What's very interesting is the nice $249 price point and we will soon see how this pans out to performance.

Like most reference high-end cards from NVIDIA, our reference GeForce GTX 275 is about as interesting as reading a dictionary. It comes with the standard big, black, boxy cooler that we're all familiar with. Unlike the Radeon HD 4890 we've seen earlier, the GeForce GTX 275 is a reluctant overclocker. We only managed to increase the core speed by a meager 37MHz and memory clock speeds by a more respectable 264MHz effective. As the benchmarks show, the GeForce GTX 275 is more than a capable performer. Clearly a notch above the GeForce GTX 260+, it also has enough oomph to trouble even the GeForce GTX 285 version.

More importantly however, this board is substantially faster against its intended competitor, the Radeon HD 4890 card. And then came the knockout roundhouse punch after a successful parry, meaning the price tag. Although NVIDIA tells us that the recommended retail price of the GeForce GTX 275 will be an astonishing $249. This makes it even cheaper than some of the existing GeForce GTX 260+ cards on the market. At that price, the GeForce GTX 275 is also about $100 less than the GeForce GTX 285, which is not that much faster. This is truly great value for money. However, the GeForce GTX 275 is not without its shortcomings.

Most notably, it is extremely hot. In fact, it is one of the hottest boards we've ever checked. This means a setup with adequate and ample ventilation is required, lest you want your whole system to go up in flames. Another thing that we didn't like was how power hungry it was. And taking everything into account, we think it is not superfluous to say that the GeForce GTX 275 is perhaps the best value for money high-end graphics card we've seen yet. Now we really hope it stays that way in retail as well and not get marked up radically as we've noted in some past instances due to shortages.