The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 series have been the king of the hill on the video cards performance for quite a while now. Their initial design was based on two PCB's with one set of GPU, memory, voltage regulation 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 chipsets design. Just like the original GeForce GTX 295, this single PCB version comes with two 55nm GPU's that each have 240 shader units, memory bandwidth is just 448-bit per chip and each has also 896MB of memory available. - techPowerUp

Mushkin GeForce GTX 295 Single PCB Cooler Review

The clock speeds have remained just as before. So in essence the performance of these 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. On the other hand many people would probably complain that there were no real performance improvements via such a product. Although Mushkin's GeForce GTX 295 follows the reference design, with the only differences being the sticker on the fan.

Mushkin has chosen to go with something that nobody else is offering, a wooden box for packaging. And once you actually receive it, it immediately radiates a feeling of quality. On the other hand, due to this box design the product is barely suited for display on just any store shelf because it lacks all these product specs information on the box. The graphics card looks powerful and stylish thanks to its industrial design with an plastic shell covering most of the device. As mentioned before, the card uses a single PCB, yet the cooler design requires a second slot. You may combine up to two GeForce GTX 295 cards for some quad SLI love.

Mushkin has decided to play it safe with their GeForce GTX 295 design. The card follows NVIDIA's reference design specifications to the letter. While it is easy to launch such a product, the problem is that everyone else has the same product as well. What does the Mushkin card offer to offset it from the competition? The only thing we see is the really nice wooden box, but that won't make a difference for most of the users. Other than that, Mushkin can certainly work on the pricing to be cheaper than similar offerings, but in our opinion a company should work on adding unique selling points to their product and not only play the price card.

On the other hand, going with an reference design removes many unknowns for potential customers. They know exactly what they get and how it will perform. Overall the GeForce GTX 295 is an extremely powerful card that can handle all of today's games very well. Even though the noise levels are not nearly close to what we could consider silent, this was to be expected with such a powerful dual GPU solution. And with the launch of Windows 7 around the corner one potential drawback might be the missing support for DirectX 11, while we have our doubts that we will see any gaming titles making good use of it soon.

These DirectX 11 cards from ATI and NVIDIA that can compete with the GeForce GTX 295 are still a good bit away, so if that is your concern you can safely get a GeForce GTX 295 graphics board today and enjoy your favourite games, while everyone else searches the internet's gossip sites for any info on the new cards.