A single-sided video card sandwich from XFX.
When the first design of the GTX295 hit bang-smack at the start of this year, it was a pretty neat piece of PCB(s) that was very different to most cards out there. Essentially two entire PCBs printed out, filled with components and slapped together with a heatsink in the middle, they were sandwichier than you'd expect. This dual-PCB design was pretty expensive to produce, requiring almost twice the materials to create, so NVIDIA engineers went back to the drawing board and managed to squeeze everything all onto the one lump of PCB.
Returning with the same GT200 cores complete with 240 stream processors each, there's a cut-down memory bus of 448-bits width but no restriction on the memory capacity. Of course due to space being at a premium, the 1792MB of GDDR3 memory sits on the back side of the PCB (with each GPU getting 896MB). This card isn't overclocked like most of the XFX cards we see, but as we'll see in a minute that doesn't mean it can't be pushed.
An all-black PCB looks really cool with the huge black shroud, and the green stickers on it leave no wiggle room for misidentifying the card as anything else but NVIDIA. A huge 92mm fan sits in the middle of the card, sucking in a phenomenal amount of air with its thick blades and spreading the cool air either side. While this does mean that some of the heat is gonna be dumped inside the case, it is very good at getting it out of the card quickly. Rather than a shared heatsink for both cores, they're each treated to a solid aluminium slug that upwards into aluminium fins. Each 'sink has a lot of heft to it, packing more metal into this one card than into your average Ford, and giving the card a funny deadzone in the middle where almost no weight resides.
On the flipside of the card we find the GDDR3 memory we mentioned above, which is treated to an oddly-textured black aluminium plate. Under load we didn't feel any part of the card get uncomfortably warm like the original design; even going so far as to be cool enough to hold throughout a benchmark run! Actual idle temps were 40 at 56.4dBA, and load only hit 53 degrees with 59.4dBA. At load this new design is two degrees cooler than the original was at idle, while knocking along at a maximum noise of 5.9dBA <i>less</i> too! It's only so often that a redesign actually manages to make such a huge improvement, and one that we definitely noticed while overclocking; hitting a final clockspeed increase of 23 per cent to 711MHz (+135MHz) and memory of 18 per cent to 1187MHz (+179MHz). This was perfectly stable, and only made around 65 degrees of heat - why they didn't invest the effort into making a design this good to begin with is confounding.
Performance was exactly where the original design was (as they share identical specs), hitting 19.5k in 3DMark 06 (just below a 4870X2), and P21740 in Vantage (much higher comparatively). Crysis and GRID were burnt through faster than an inattentive wafflemaker's charred goods, giving a way-more-than-eyeballs-need level of frames in both. There isn't much that this card can't inhale and devour, and XFX is even kind enough to throw in a free Vantage key worth $US20 and a copy of Far Cry 2.
With improvements in every way over the original, you'd be absolutely mad not to grab this version over that toasty sandwich.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012