NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 series have been the king of the hill in graphics cards performance for quite a while now. Their initial design was based on two PCB's with one set of GPU, memory and voltage regulation for each. Now NVIDIA has updated their design to cram all components onto a single PCB. While there was some speculation about such a product, many people thought it impossible to be realized due to the large die size and heat output of the GT200 chipset design. Just like the original GeForce GTX 295, the single PCB version comes with two 55nm GPU's that each have 240 shading units, memory bandwidth is 448-bit per GPU and each of these has 896MB of memory available. - techPowerUp

Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum one-Styler Review

The clocks remained at 576/1998MHz, so in essence the performance of the new GeForce GTX 295 is unchanged to the old one. This also explains why NVIDIA has not released a new product name for their new card generation. This makes it more difficult for customers to spot the right product they want, something like GeForce GTX 295+ would had made sense for that. But on the other hand many people would probably complain that there were no performance improvements. Inno3D has taken the NVIDIA reference design and followed its specs to the letter, this means that this card is identical to any other GeForce GTX 295 card.

Inno3D's package lists all the major product highlights on the front, yet there is no mention of single PCB or Platinum anywhere. The card looks massive thanks to its industrial design and the plastic shell covering most of the device. And as mentioned before, the card uses a single PCB, yet the cooler design requires a second slot. The card has two DVI ports, the most common output configuration today. But if you want to use the board with your big TV screen you can use the included HDMI adapter. You may combine up to two GeForce GTX 295 cards in SLI for quad SLI love, and you are free to mix dual and single PCB cards for this.

So Inno3D is positioning their GeForce GTX 295 Platinum at around $550, which means it will be sold at the same price as the dual PCB version. Now we think it is pretty amazing that NVIDIA has managed to put two GT200's and supporting components onto just a single PCB. And while this is certainly impressive from an engineering perspective, that change alone doesn't benefit the end user much. Due to the new cooler used, the video card is actually quieter than the dual PCB design but from a rendering performance perspective there are no improvements. As such not much is changing from a buyers and game play point of view.

For the partners there is a fundamental improvement with the new GeForce GTX 295, it is much cheaper to manufacture. And the major cost savings come from one less circuit board, cheaper voltage regulation circuitry and just less complex manufacturing process. This will allow substantial price reduction on the GeForce GTX 295 in the future, which will benefit you as a customer. At this time there is not much to see of these price cuts yet. The single PCB version of the GeForce GTX 295 costs as much as the dual PCB version right now. If you already have a GeForce GTX 295 there is no real reason to upgrade to the single PCB version.

If you are in the market for a new card, the single PCB edition is the better overall choice, except if you plan on using software based voltage control on your board. Then the dual PCB version should be your weapon of choice.