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.

Mushkin's GeForce GTX 295 follows the reference design specifications, with the only differences being the sticker on the fan hub and the accessory package.

Packaging

Mushkin has chosen to go with something that nobody else is offering: a wooden box for packaging. When you receive it it immediately radiates a feeling of quality. On the other hand, due to the box design the product is barely suited for display on a store shelf because it lacks all product specs information on the box.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• DVI to analog adapter
• DVI to HDMI adapter
• SPDIF audio cable
• Driver CD (not in the picture)

The Card

The card looks powerful and stylish thanks to its industrial design with a 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.