nVidia GeForce GTX 295 Revealed Comments

Just to stay consistent with the reported specs, it should state that the card has 56 ROPs. The card has 28 ROPs per GPU and thus 56 ROPs on the card in total.

The card better be quite a bit faster than the 4870X2, NVIDIA has had more than enough time to prepare a proper counterattack. As for pricing, rumors indicate that it has a MSRP of $499, which is lower than what the 4870X2 currently has. Although the price of a 4870X2 will probably be lowered upon the GTX295's launch, that's just my prediction though.

*ati is unaffected by nvidia's attack*

*ati unleashes hd 4970/4870 x3/x4*

*nvidia fainted!*

289w TDP ! That'll take some cooling. Hope its not the Nvidia Dustbuster mk2.

Frankly, at 289W TDP, that's a lot less then the 4870 X2, and may be even less then my single 4870 512MB. Considering it's two GPU's on one card, 289W is a worthy achievement.

Any graphics card guzzling the best part of 300w is no achievement in my eyes. The fact that the 4870 X2 sucks up 265w flat out (xbit labs) is bad enough but that it uses 80w idling is deplorable. Intel and AMD realised a while back that the 'CPU nuclear arms race' was reaching meltdown and have concentrated on efficiency as well as performance. Cool and quiet seems to have passed Nvidia and ATI by.

>The fact that the 4870 X2 sucks up 265w flat out (xbit labs) is bad enough but that it
>uses 80w idling is deplorable

I think the 265w flat out isn't a big problem, but the 80w while idle I would agree.
If you don't want 265w flat out, then underclock the card, its horses for courses I suppose, do you want fast frame rate, or save the planet. Maybe Nvidia can borrow Intels 45nn manufacturing lab to bring the wattage down a tad.

Indeed. What I am really waiting for is a decent passive card from the current generation for my living room machine.

I know Gigabyte do a passively cooled 1GB 4850 (model no. GV-R485MC-1GH).

As far as the 4870X2's power consumption goes, I was going on Bit-tech's figures where it's load consumption was measured at a mind-boggling 483W, with the 4870 512MB coming in at 333W. That's why I thought Nvidia's 289W sounded so good. Must be different testing methodologies between Bit-tech and X-bit labs though.

were you factoring in the fact that Bit-Tech takes the power reading from the wall socket and reports that as-is? They do this deliberately as there's no sure-fire way of knowing what the power consumption without a graphics card is because you need a card of some sort to boot the machine enough to take a reading! You could do a relative measurement, but that wouldn't give you the total card output then!

No, thanks for the explanation. Talking of Bit-tech, why no cheese-cake reviews on TR this Christmas? Where do I turn to for an alternative opinion? Ah well, I doubt anyone will read this now with this news-story being so old :)