Monday, November 3, 2008

NVIDIA 280 GTX :powerful performance with some problems

Every one has heard about the power of the new nvidia graphics card - NVIDIA 280 GTX - which is the most expensive graphics card now. Yes, this is a very poweful card which contains 1.4 billion transistors and includes the nvidia PhysX and CUDA technologies, but it's really hard to use it. First, its price is very high and it gives out great heat and you shouldn't buy it if yiu haven't a very efficient cooling system and a big chassis for your computer and a water cooling system is recommended specially to overclock its speed and all that will cost too much in addition to its price. Also you need to use a very powerful processor with high speed and it's recommended to be 3.2Ghz for dual core processor and 3.0Ghz for a quad core one. This card delivers a very high performance but notice that it isn't the fastest one as NVIDIA 9800GTX is faster but 280GTX has more processing streams.But after all that I can say that the best things in this card is the nvidia PhysX and CUDA technologies,the overclocking ability and the high number of shader cores ,but there are big problems you must face if you buy this card.First its high price ,second the very high temperture ( can reach 80'C) ,third it doesn't support direct X 10.1 at all and it doesn't have a DDR5 ram. I see that ATI graphics cards can deliver high performance without these problems.  

NVIDIA 280 GTX specifications :
Processor Cores 240
Graphics Clock (MHz) 602 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz) 1296 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 48.2
 
Memory Specs:  
Memory Clock (MHz) 1107 MHz
Standard Memory Config 1GB GDDR3
Memory Interface Width 512-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 141.7
 
Feature Support:  
NVIDIA SLI®-ready1 2-/3-way
NVIDIA PureVideo® Technology2 HD
NVIDIA PhysX™-ready3
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
NVIDIA HybridPower™ Technology4
GeForce Boost  
Microsoft DirectX 10
OpenGL 2.1
Bus Support PCI-E 2.0 x16
Certified for Windows Vista
 
Display Support:  
Maximum Digital Resolution 2560 X 1600
Maximum VGA Resolution 2048 X 1536
Standard Display Connectors 2 dual-link DVI and 1 analog HDTV-out
Multi Monitor (# of displays) 2
HDCP5
HDMI6 Via Adapter
Audio Input for HDMI SPDIF
 
Standard Graphics Card Dimensions:  
Height 4.376 inches (111 mm)
Length 10.5 inches (267 mm)
Width Dual-slot

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