GeForce GTX 280 Video Card Review

To make the comparison between the new GeForce GTX 280 and the other video cards we included in this review easier, we compiled the table below comparing the main specs from these cards. If you want to compare the specs of the new GTX 280 to any other video card not included on the table below, just take a look on our nVidia Chips Comparison Table and on our AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table.

Just for the record, the GeForce GTX 280 reference model uses 16 Hynix H5RS5223CFR N2C GDDR3 chips. These chips officially support a clock frequency of up to 1,200 MHz. On this video card they run at 1,107 MHz, so there is a tight 8.4% headroom for you to overclock the video card memories still maintaining them inside their specs. Of course you can always try pushing memories above their specs, but it isn’t guaranteed that the overclocking will work.

GPU	Core Clock	Shader Clock	Proc.	Memory Clock	Memory Interface	Memory Transfer Rate	Memory	Price
GeForce GTX 280	602 MHz	1,296 MHz	240	1,107 MHz	512-bit	141.7 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	USD 649
GeForce 9800 GX2	600 MHz	1,500 MHz	128	1,000 MHz	256-bit	64 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	USD 470 - 550
GeForce 9800 GTX	675 MHz	1,688 MHz	128	1,100 MHz	256-bit	70.4 GB/s	512 MB GDDR3	USD 270 - 355
Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2	857 MHz	857 MHz	320	927 MHz	256-bit	59.33 GB/s	1 GB GDDR3	–
Radeon HD 3870	776 MHz	776 MHz	320	1,125 MHz	256-bit	72 GB/s	512 MB GDDR4	USD 150 - 200

Some important observations regarding this table:

All these video cards are DirectX 10 (Shader 4.0).
The memory clocks listed are the real memory clock. Memory clocks are often advertised as double the figures presented, numbers known as “DDR clock”.
GeForce 9800 GX2 and Radeon HD 3870 X2 have two GPU’s. The numbers on the table represent only one of the chips.
All video cards included on our review were running at the chip manufacturer default clock configuration (i.e. no overclocking), except Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2. The official core clock for Radeon HD 3870 X2 is 825 MHz, while the official memory clock is 900 MHz. So this card was a little bit overclocked. We couldn’t reduce these clocks to their reference values and since we hadn’t any other Radeon HD 3870 X2 available we included this video card anyway. That is why this is the only video card we are disclosing the vendor and exact model.
Prices were researched at Newegg.com one day before this review was published. The price for GeForce GTX 280 is the maximum suggested retail price (MRSP) set by nVidia. We couldn’t find Sapphire Atomic HD 3870 X2 for sale. This model will be more expensive than cards from other vendors based on the same GPU because it features water cooling. Just for you to have an idea, prices on the regular Radeon 3870 X2 are quoted between USD 315 and USD 405.

We faced an overheating situation during our tests and we’d like to take some time now to explain what happened exactly. During our Quake 4 benchmarking the system was very unstable. The first thing that came to our mind was that the card was overheating. Touching it we could see that it was hotter than what we expected. Inspecting this problem further it turned out that the overheating wasn’t being caused by the video card itself, but by the fan attached on top of the north bridge chip on our nForce 790i motherboard, which was blowing hot air on the video card, causing it to overheat. This is clearly a design flaw from this particular motherboard. We solved this issue by removing the north bridge fan and adding a 120-mm fan on top of our system. So if you buy this card make sure that your case is well-ventilated and that the north bridge cooler isn’t blowing hot air on your video card. You can see the problem on Figure 11.

click to enlarge
Figure 11: The north bridge fan was causing our GTX 280 to overheat.