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GT200 GTX280/260 "official specs"

Yeah, up for all of 20 minutes!

Here's a snip though:

The other thing is that unlike the 9800 GX2 we tested with today, the GTX 280 is overclocked out of the box from ZOTAC, making the card a little faster than the stock clocked offerings that we will no doubt see.

So what are my actual thoughts on the card? – Okay, yes it’s nice that we’ve got the performance of two GPUs on one card that takes less power, but at the moment an immature driver doesn’t give us the gains that we probably expected to see with a 512-bit memory interface and an increase in stream processors. Do I think that the GTX 280 is going to be performing significantly better in a months’ time? - Absolutely! Will it be too late? - We’re not too sure.

The other thing I have to say before I wrap this all up is that I’ve tested the HD 4850, and I’ve tested it in Crossfire. Now, if I hadn’t tested those cards I may have been more impressed with the GTX 280, but I have. I’ve seen the performance figures the cards put out. We also know the price on a pair of HD 4850s is going to be under $600 AUD, while the new GTX 280 in stock form seems to be launching at the absolute cheapest in Australia in the low $700 AUD area. Ouch.
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SO i'm guessing from that that two 4850 in crossfire is pretty close to GTX280 performance.
 
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I think the first time I am ever going to be tempted by a dual GPU config is when the 4870's are released with 1GB on-card memory.
 
Here's another snip for you:

Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3GHz (333MHz x 9)
Cooling: Corsair Nautilus500 (Supplied by Corsair) with Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound (Supplied by Arctic Cooling)
Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE X48-DQ6 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)
Memory: 2 X 1GB Kingston PC6400 DDR-2 3-3-3-10 (KHX6400D2ULK2/2G) (Supplied by Kingston)
Hard Disk(s): Seagate 250GB 7200RPM SATA-2 7200.10 (Supplied by Seagate)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista SP1
Drivers: ForceWare 175.16 (9 Series) 177.34 (GTX 280)

s mentioned in our intro, we will be comparing the card against the last generation single GPU chAMP!ion; the 9800 GTX, along with its more powerful brother, the twin GPU 9800 GX2. What we’ve also done is include the HD 3870 X2 which is AMDs current flagship card.

Being the latest flagship card from NVIDIA, we have also upped the ante by including benchmarks at 2560 x 1600 to really test out not only the GTX 280, but the other cards we have here. We have also included Vantage for the first time which will now be making a regular appearance with it being added to our lineup. We were waiting for the right time to add it into the lineup and we thought the release of the GTX 280 was the perfect reason to do so.

In our first test, what we can see is that the HD 3870 X2 still comes out on top thanks to the ATI driver teams’ great dedication to the synthetic benchmark that is 3DMark06. We can see the GTX 280 AMP! from ZOTAC just trailing behind the older Dual GPU 9800 GX2.



With the settings cranked up on Crysis, we continue to see the GTX 280 and GX2 score very similarly to each other. While the GT200 based card does fix up the 2560 x 1600 performance issue in Crysis, even with a 600% increase in performance it’s still extremely far from playable.
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Why didn't they put the 177.34 on the 9800GTX and 9800GX2 cards? WHo knows how much any of the performance gains came from just the new drivers? :mad:

And why compare a GTX280 overclocked to 700Mhz to a stock 9800GTX and 9800GX2? :confused:

I would have clocked it back down to stock before testing. So on their review if the GTX280 had been running at stock, it would have been slower than a GX2.

Okay to blame un optimised drivers but it's looking likely the GTX280 is only worth it at very high res to make full use of the memory bus and extra memory.
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
looks like the 4870x2 is going to trounce the gtx 280 tbh..

can anyone tell me if crossfire works in more games than SLi does?
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Yep. SLI works on profiles, crossfire in drivers so more likely to work than SLI.

However, dependant on ATI drivers. There has in the past been games which have no/little gain in crossfire until ATI fixed the drivers.

Problem is that the 4870x2 is not out for a few months so I reckon quite a few people will be buying two 4870's in crossfire.

SHould be interesting watching the battles at the top of the 3dmark06,vantage and crysis databases on here over the next few weeks.
 
So...when are these (and the AMD cards) on sale on ocuk? :p I'm ordering on release day for the first time ever!
 
i dont care about 3D marks, which one is fastest in the majority of games i care about.

so 2x 4870's wouldnt the x2 be better because of the shared memory? wonder how much of a difference that would actually make
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
i dont care about 3D marks, which one is fastest in the majority of games i care about.

so 2x 4870's wouldnt the x2 be better because of the shared memory? wonder how much of a difference that would actually make
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Google some reviews between the 3870's in crossfire and the 3870x2 and you will see very little difference.

Convenience of having one card plus the possibility of having two 4870x2's in crossfire. :D
 
Greebo said:
Also Dell use to use their oen mobo where the power connector was wired up backwards and so was the psu which means you had to buy a new psu from Dell.

If you google it, there used to be a video on the new showing what happens when you plug a normal psu into a Dell mobo - fireworks and sparks!

Might not be the case now but something to check cause as well as a new psu, you might be looking at a new mobo as well.

No bad thing if you did though since at least you will be able to overclock since Dell cripple the bios on their mobo.
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That was the past. My friend runs his Q6600 at 3.6ghz on his XPS630. The bios while not offering all the options of a top board, offers enough to get a good overclock. Also the board is fully atx now. As is the psu. In fact Dell psu's on Inspiron desktops, and XPS systems have been atx for some time now, using a standard 24pin atx and either a 6pin 12v aux or 8pin eps connector.

Anyway, I was able to inspect the PSU closely this morning. It has 4 12v rails each at 18amps and the total combined power on the 12v rail is 60amps. So I guess he is good to go for a GX280.
 
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