First look: NVIDIA GTX280

Josh Collins finally crawls out from under his NDA and delivers some initial results and thoughts on NVIDIA's newest bad boy.

*queue applause and wild reactions*

This is generally the kind of impression the GTX280 has made upon reviewers.

No doubt, if you’re an enthusiast you’ve been doing the rounds for the past 10-12 hours eating every bit of information available. No doubt you’ve seen the number of online reviews available; you’ve probably even seen k|ngp|n’s killer results. He’s thrown three under LN2 and let fly. But now it’s time for the Atomic touch.

We got our hands on these sensual silicon lovetoys about three weeks or so ago. Due to my crazy schedule I’ve been busy flying around the place, visiting this, that and the other manufacturer and of course hitting deadline to produce that bit of black and green monthly lovin’.

Even after being out of the picture last week with what was only a step short of pneumonia, I benched all last night to get some results for all of you, knowing full well I had to be up at 6am to start the daily grind… well, at least that was the plan (fuck, I’m a hard taskmaster –ed).

The test bed for this session was as follows:

790i Ultra SLI reference w/ P05 BIOS
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650/QX9770 @ 4GHz cooled by Noctua NH-C12P
Corsair Dominator DDR3-1800 7-7-7-20 1T
Reference/XFX/Leadtek GTX280
Silverstone OP1000
80GB SATA HDD
Windows Vista 64-bit

So, I get home and start benching at 9pm. The idea was to run through some numbers and give you all a sneak peak at some of the coverage for the next issue. By 1am I simply had to give up due to exhaustion, knowing I had to get up in five hours time to assure I still made it to work.

There didn’t seem to be a problem initially. I’ve got the 790i Ultra SLI test bench setup at home to mimic the GPU test platform at work. This meant the usual 4GHz quad core with all the usual stuff and up until now I’ve never had any issues.

I un-installed the drivers and the 9800GX2 that was sitting in the system, downloaded the 177.34 drivers from the NVIDIA FTP and also installed 3DMark06; I only had memory related apps installed at this point. While it’s time consuming to get this tedious stuff done, I finally got my kit running smoothly and ready to go.

After discussions with some of my fellow overclockers – under the same NDA for the past couple weeks – I knew that we were all in for a treat. And rightly so, as the benchmark finished it popped up an 18.1k 3DMarks – nice for a single core, single PCB GPU solution.

Next up was the usual opening salvo of CPU-Z and GPU-Z windows. This is where my nightmare began.

As the final CPU-Z window opened the system crashed. A complete black screen reset. WTF!?

To say I was a little pissed off was an understatement; I figured I’d just re-run the benchmark. Remember, the system being used has run these benchmarks effortlessly at these system settings for all recent GPUs, both NVIDIA and ATI flavoured. So what the deuce?

This game of cat and mouse with benchmarking went on for a number of hours. The system was hanging and rebooting at every stage possible. At the very start of the benchmark, at the very end, as the result appeared, between loading tests… there just was no rhyme or reason behind this madness.

I tried everything I could think of; this became increasingly difficult as I could feel myself not only getting more tired with every passing moment but also slipping back into the ill state I was in last week – screw that for a game of soldiers.

I tried upping different voltages, from CPU vcore to vfsb, and played extensively with the MCP and SPP voltages. I tried more volts, I tried less volts, but in the end though the system was just plain frustrating.

So, it does 18.1k 3DMark06 – take my word. A 9800GTX 512MB does 14.8-15k, an 8800GTS 512MB manages 14.1k, an 8800GTX 768MB 13.9k, a 9600GT 11.4-12.6k and the big bertha 9800GX2 nudges by in 3DMark06 with 19.7k.

I would have loved to have had the screenshots for you all, because as we all know, it ain’t true unless there are pictures to prove it. But ultimately, the hardware gods were against us this time around. However, rest assured I’ve brought the cards into work today and, given the chance, I’ll post a little somethin’ somethin’ for you all.

I may not have the screenie, but I thought I might let you all into my private world and check out my ‘benching dungeon’ as my friends tend to call it.



Stay tuned peeps and please, don’t nail me to the cross for this one, I’m already feeling dead as it is ~_~