XFX GTX280

Good things come, clothed in green, pushing pixels to your screen.

This is one card that was sadly left out of last month’s roundup – but never fear! Clad in the usual blackened plastic cooler with intricate green artwork adorning the front, this is one card that simply looks fast. The good news? It is.

Running with the GT200 core that we have come to know intimately, and manufactured on the 65nm process that has been a mainstay for most NVIDIA cards for the past few months, this GTX280 runs at stock frequencies. Unsurprisingly, this also means that the amount of memory remains unchanged, though at a whole gigabyte of GDDR3 running on a 512-bit memory bus, this is definitely more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at, let alone actually need.

The stock cooler is the usual offering, managing load temperatures of 68 degrees at 57.2dBA, and idle temps of 38 and 53.7dBA. This is on par with every other reference GTX280 out there, so there’s nothing particularly exceptional about this one. It is more than sufficient for some overclocking though.

Game performance was very nice, with good scores returned across the board. Even in the newly added 3DMark Vantage the card performs admirably, with the potential for even more if you use PhysX drivers (which weren’t used in the testing). With more and more games supporting PhysX, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

It also seems that these cards still have that strange screaming issue from last issue – we were even able to change the pitch during the Crysis options menu!

With good performance, a copy of Assassin’s Creed bundled in and a decent price, this is definitely a card to consider.