Gainward GeForce GTX 275 Graphics Card

The Card

Shifting our attention toward the card itself, we can see that we're not looking at a reference design here. Gainward has opted for the dual fan cooler that we've seen on a few cards from them now. It manages to take up the whole card, not letting us see a whole lot of anything else.

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Looking closely behind the fans, we can see the heat pipes, aluminum fins along with some signs of copper. This is a really nice cooler that has proved to perform well in the past and hopefully it continues to do a good job on the GTX 275.

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Going for a quick spin around the card, there isn't anything that you wouldn't expect to see on a GTX 200 series graphics card from NVIDIA. At the back of the card we have two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors that are needed to power it. We also have another connector; here is where the S/PDIF loopback cable is connected and in conjunction with the DVI to HDMI connector you can get not only video, but audio through the graphics card.

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Closer toward the front of the card, we have two SLI connectors which gives us the ability to run up to three of these bad boys together. While we won't be making use of them today, they're something we certainly intend to make use of at a later date.

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In the I/O department we can see two Dual-Link DVI connectors along with our standard TV-Out port. Above this we have some vents that let the hot air escape. I have to admit it was a bit surprising to see that no HDMI was included natively, since we've seen more and more NVIDIA cards offer this over the past few months. However, this isn't a huge deal with the connector included in the package that has the ability to carry sound.

Specifications

Below we can clearly see the numbers; 633MHz core clock, 2268MHz DDR memory clock on the 896MB of GDDR3 utilizing a 448-bit bus and a 1404MHz shader clock. How's this compare to the other NVIDIA offerings? - Compared to the GTX 285, there's not a whole lot as far as MHz goes with that card utilizing a 648 / 2484 DDR / 1476 MHz setup. Where the GTX 285 does have the jump on the GTX 275, however, is a 512-bit memory bus. It also carries 1GB of GDDR3, but this isn't a huge deal. Compared to the GTX 260, both cards carry the same amount of memory and bus width, but the clocks are a fair bit lower on the 260 with a 576 / 1998 DDR / 1242MHz setup.

How's this compare to the HD 4890, though? - Stream processors are a big one; 800 on the HD 4890 compared to 240 on the GTX 275. ATI clearly have it there, but in the bus width department ATI use a 256-bit bus against the 448-bit. Of course, in the memory clock department it's all over the place, thanks to GDDR4 the HD 4890 having a 3900MHz QDR clock.

Both cards utilize a 55nm GPU and both are priced at the around the same point. One will be cheaper than the other, though, as a price war begins between manufacturers; not good for them, but good for the consumer who gets a better bang for buck at the end of the day.