Zotac GeForce GTX 285 & GTX 295

In the introduction to this article, I mentioned that due to a string of what some might consider bad luck, this article wound up being posted far later than I hoped it’d be. But, despite it finally being up, it’s still lacking a few things, most notably overclocking reports and power consumption.

Let’s start with overclocking, which we had to forego testing of due to time. For the most part, neither of these cards “need” to be overclocked, as they are two of the most powerful on the market right now. Some might consider even contemplating overclocking to be a waste of time, and for the most part, I’d agree.

However, the GTX 295 might be the card to benefit a little from a boosted frequency, only because its clocks are lower than the GTX 285. But, it will be difficult to achieve high clocks on a dual-GPU card, so it’s really up to you whether or not you want to spend an evening finding a sweet spot for only a few extra MHz’s.

The lack of power consumption results is simple. During the string of bad luck, my Kill-A-Watt decided that it was time to kick the bucket. Talk about great timing! Because I live in such a remote country (Canada), I wasn’t able to get in a replacement as quick as I’d like, but it will be here this week. Once it hits my doorstep, I’ll go back and re-test each card to produce some results. Once done, I’ll update this article with the respective graph.

Lastly, another issue that crept up were problems with ATI’s graphics drivers, which was the main reason for being able to include only two ATI cards. Even still, I’m not entirely confident with the results shown for both the HD 4870 1GB and HD 4870 X2 2GB, because I found many hitches during runs in a few select titles (Call of Duty: World at War, and Far Cry 2, especially). I won’t get deep into the story here, but you can feel free to check out both my news post where I explain the issues, and also the discussion thread where I delve even deeper into things.

Final Thoughts

With all of that whining out of the way, let’s get right to my conclusions on NVIDIA’s latest releases. One of NVIDIA’s goals with these new cards was to grab back the top spot for performance, and they’ve accomplished that with both of these. On the GTX 285 side of things, the card proves to be the fastest single-GPU solution on the market, and has a comfortable lead ahead of the GTX 280 in most tests.

That card is a little unique in a strange way, though. Essentially, it didn’t really have to be released, because it doesn’t add much in way of major performance gains, over the GTX 280. However, since NVIDIA finally managed to bring their GTX 200 core to a 55nm process, it only made sense to release a single-GPU version of the card, so that can’t be faulted.

Is the GTX 285 worth it, then? For the most part, it can be, but it depends on what you are looking for. From a performance perspective, it scales pretty well with the GTX 280, and for that increase, there will be ~$50 tacked onto the final price. Additional benefits would be slightly lower temperatures and a lower power draw, clock-for-clock, compared to the previous card. So you can take that information into consideration when trying to decide on one.

Zotac’s GTX 285 & GTX 295