Introduction

Even though today was supposed to be AMD's day with the HD 4890 announcement, NVIDIA decided to crash their party. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 was initially planned for April 9, but when the green camp realized they had a great card on their hands they changed the date to ensure editors had GTX 275 comparison numbers in their reviews.

The GeForce GTX 275 doesn't bring anything new to the table. It is basically half a GTX 295 running at 633 / 1134 / 1404 MHz (core/memory/shader). You can see it as a GeForce GTX 285 with a 448-bit memory interface, or you could see it as a GTX 260 with 240 shaders and higher clocks.

Zotac as one of NVIDIA's premier partners has built an Amp! Edition card that uses the reference design, but comes at higher clocks of 702 MHz core, 1260 MHz memory and 1512 MHz shader for a price increase of about $20.

Packaging & Contents

Zotac's package comes with a small window that lets you inspect the merchandise before shelling out your hard earned cash. I think the "AMP!" Edition logo is a bit small on the package, easy to miss it.



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation + Driver CD
• DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter
• PCI-Express power cables
• Racedriver: Grid full game
• 3DMark Vantage full version
• SPDIF audio cable

The Card

Apart from the sticker the card looks like any other GTX 260 / 280 card. It uses two cooling slots as expected.


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 two or three GTX 275 cards in SLI for improved performance or better image quality.



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.

A Closer Look

The cooler of the GTX 275 is identical to that on the GTX 285 or 55 nm GTX 260.


Two six pin power connectors are present on the card. Both are required for operation of the card. Further to the right in the picture you can see the white input for SPDIF audio.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QH-Hj08. With a cycle time of 0.8 ns, they are specified to run at 1250 MHz.


The ADP4100 voltage controller has been spotted first on the NVIDIA P897 design for the GTX 260. It does not support the I2C interface which means software voltage control will be almost impossible to implement.


The GPU is the NVIDIA GT200b, which is made in a 55 nm process with 1.4 billion transistors.