Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Cards ?

Community Founder Joined: Jun 30, 2005 Posts: 2386

Hi all, normally when we get a release of a new Graphics card we get a few topics going Very Happy

I noticed we havnt had anything on this new card the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 model Confused

What are your thoughts if any Question

cheers all
|2es-mrix

Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2008 10:27 pm

Dont mind if i do Smile

It's pretty amazing for what it is: it can beat the 9800 GX2 at most things- remember the GX2 is a dual chip, more like a sandwich to be honest, graphics card.

Still features hybrid power like the 9 series, but to be perfectly honest- nvidia are sweatin to losing their dominate status as the GPU king, and making marketing mistakes in the process.

Basically- ATI's new 4800 series is a MAJOR come back for ATI, they've sorted out the AA issues, their new 4870 uses GDDR5 memory! and their GPU fabrication size is 55nm- compared to nvidia's 65nm.

Their cards from the 3000 series up- use less power and run cooler than an nvidia. The fact too that it makes there cards cheaper to mass produce/sell
Recent benchmarks have shown that the Radeon 4870 CAN beat a Nvidia 9800GTX!! Surprised

!

And the green machine IS panicking. They got the 9800GTX+ coming out soon, is a 55nm GPU shrink of the current 9800GTX- something they maybe should of thought of doing before they released the 200 series.

Though Nvidia's high end cards in each series are beasts- they run too hot, take up too much power and are very expensive.

But one that sets the 280 apart from everything else- one card can play Crysis in DX10 very high at 1280x1024, above 50fps+, bung two of them in SLI, and Crysis has just had its ass handed to itself! bung them in Tri-SLI! and AA is possibly the only thing stopping you from a smooth frame rate at a high resolution

To be perfectly honest, thinking of buying one? Yeah id love one, thats if you've got a bottomless wallet, with a 790i Ultra mobo, the fastest Intel CPU and lots of fast ass DDR3 RAM to boot.
I'd wait and see what ATI is going to come out with and see how that effects what Nvidia does next.
Word has it that another dual chip Radeon, this time two 4870's on one PCB- dubbed the 4780 X2, is coming out near august and thats set to be "the 280 killer". It'll be cheaper, run cooler and need less power to run than a single 280 - hence Nvidia is 'sweating'.

They've released a new forceware driver (175.19) for cards 6 series and up on Vista- fulling utilizing the card from memory to shaders to the upper most, meaning- they've been holding the drivers back for vista users! thats almost as bad as what daniel_k discovered about what Creative where doing with their Audigy/X-fi drivers for Vista!

Oh yeah, The fact too that nvidia have pissed off Intel big time and Intel have become a alot more friendly with ATI recently- leaving Nvidia in the near future up sh*t creek if they dont apologize.

The Nvidia 280 is alot of money for one card. No doubt that at the present it is the fastest GPU right now, breaking 3Dvantage scores constantly and finally teaching Crysis the 'sit' command, in being the fastest, its the most expensive, hottest and most power hungry graphics card there is out there.
"choose wisely grasshopper"

Community Founder Joined: Jun 30, 2005 Posts: 2386

Wow wasnt expecting that responce Very Happy

Cheers
|2es-mrix

Joined: Jul 01, 2005 Posts: 482 Location: Watching You

Ty on mentioning the new forceware drivers downloading those now Laughing

Joined: Dec 17, 2006 Posts: 202 Location: Scunthorpe UK

Hi peeps,

|2es-imitation_wicker wrote:

Dont mind if i do Smile

It's pretty amazing for what it is: it can beat the 9800 GX2 at most things- remember the GX2 is a dual chip, more like a sandwich to be honest, graphics card."

I dont know how many reviews you've looked at imi wicker, but although the 280 does beat the 98gx2 in some places/ games, in most the gx2 is on par if not better!
I feel at the moment there is no reason to buy a 280 over the gx2 unless you are gaming with resulutions @ 2560x1600 or higher!

|2es-imitation_wicker wrote:

Basically- ATI's new 4800 series is a MAJOR come back for ATI, they've sorted out the AA issues, their new 4870 uses GDDR5 memory! and their GPU fabrication size is 55nm- compared to nvidia's 65nm.
Their cards from the 3000 series up- use less power and run cooler than an nvidia. The fact too that it makes there cards cheaper to mass produce/sell
Recent benchmarks have shown that the Radeon 4870 CAN beat a Nvidia 9800GTX!! Surprised

!"

The 48 series is a great come back for ati, at the moment though there are problems with overheating due to the fans been locked at 14% speed! There are ways around this though with using after market coolers or changing some lines in one of the .inf files for the cc center thing for ati cards. Im sure this issue will be addressed with new drivers though!

Also Nvidia has released new drivers and software for the physix engine thats built into the cards, at the moment it is supposed to only be for the 9*** and 2*** series gfx cards but it will work on 8 series if your card is one with the G92 process , not the older G80 ones!
This will become available for all nvidia dx10 gfx over the coming weeks! Very Happy

I think the price of nvidias newest gfx cards is just ridiculas, especially now ati are making a great come back! You can pick up a 4870 for half the price of a 98gtx! Nvidia will have to work on thier prices to stay on top of the game!

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:01 pm

Aye for the time being new gfx cards are overpriced and unnecessary imo. Cash best spent elsewhere.

Tom's hardware is a good site for hardware reviews/overclocking etc

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nvidia-gtx-280,review-30971.html

Very noisy and not much gained over the 9800, as said above.

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:31 pm

ScunnyUK wrote:

Hi peeps,
I dont know how many reviews you've looked at imi wicker, but although the 280 does beat the 98gx2 in some places/ games, in most the gx2 is on par if not better!

The 9800GX2 doesnt too bad against the 280GTX, christ there's only 3 months between them, but hence the point i made of the 280 GTX being a single chip GPU. It takes a dual chip graphics card to slighty over power the 280 GTX, thats why the 280 is pretty amazing stuff Smile

To be honest im waiting for the Raedon 4870 X2, my second 2900XT died 2 days ago, its actually been slowly dieing for the past 6 months ive just found out Evil or Very Mad

, so when the 4870 X2 comes out im going for two of them bad boys Very Happy

Even one of them will be expensive mind, but still cheaper than a single 280GTX, it might use slighty more power, but run cooler most of all.

Just think, an Intel X48 motherboard costs far less than an Nvidia 790i Ultra motherboard, plus DDR3 Intel XMP memory modules are more readily available than DDR3 Nvidia EPP 2.0 modules- now which is the wallet and retail freindly one there?

I think Nvidia are really up sh*t creek come august, the old saying "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" is all too much of a reality here.

Intel having become alot more homely with ATI, Nvidias opposition. ATI and Havok, a division of Intel that specialize in physics processing on the CPU, have joined together to offer an alternative to Nvidia's (AEGIA) PhysX.
Nvidia have p*ssed off Intel big time with their statement that a fast GPU with a slow CPU is far better than a fast CPU with a slow GPU. Nvidia depend on Intel for there chipsets, with Bloomfield (Intels new CPU) and Larrabee (Intels own GPU) coming round the corner, Nvidia need to apologize and make up or face being in AMD's present situation in the near future or worse.

But then again, its all swings and roundabouts in this business, every Quarter of the year something new.
Back in the day it was an AMD processor and a Nvidia graphics card that ruled the roost, god those were the days Cool