Introduction

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 Series has been the King of the Hill in graphics cards performance for quite a while now. The initial design was based on two PCBs 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 NVIDIA GT200 GPU design.

Just like the original GeForce GTX 295, the single-PCB GTX 295 comes with two 55 nm GPUs that each have 240 shading units, memory bus width is 448 bit per GPU and each GPU has 896 MB of memory available. The clock speeds have remained at 576 / 999 MHz. So in essence the performance of the "new" 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 GTX 295+ would had made sense for that. On the other hand many people (us included) would probably complain that there were no real performance improvements in such a product.

Inno3D has taken the NVIDIA reference design and followed its specs to the letter, this means that this card is identical to any other GTX 295 single PCB reference card out there, except for the sticker on the cooler.

Packaging

Inno3D's package lists all the major product highlights on the front, yet there is no mention of "single PCB" or "Platinum" anywhere.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD
• Far Cry 2 Full Version + Warmonger Full Version
• 10% off coupon for NVIDIA's online shop
• DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter
• PCI-Express power cable
• SPDIF audio cable

The Card

The card looks massive thanks to its industrial design and the plastic shell covering most of the device. As mentioned before, the card uses a single PCB, yet the cooler design requires a second slot.


The card has two DVI ports, the most common output configuration today. If you want to use the card with your big TV screen you can use the included HDMI adapter. In case you need an analog port you can also use the included DVI adapter.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.


You may combine up to two GeForce GTX 295 cards in SLI for Quad-SLI love. You are free to mix dual-PCB and single-PCB GTX 295 cards for SLI.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.