Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

When you have just one major rival, finishing second can be curiously motivating. That was likely the impetus behind the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 ($500, street), which rests the high-end graphics crown from the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. Nvidia’s weapon was a new GT200 GPU with a smaller die size—the result of a shift from a 65- to a 55-nm manufacturing process. The downsized die cut power needs, letting the engineers put two GPUs, along with their high-speed GDDR3 RAM, into one device that wouldn’t blow past the PCIe power specs for a single slot.

It also made the GTX 295 faster overall than the rival ATI card. That said, bang for the buck, measured in dollars per frame per second, is about the same for the two—and the GTX 295, while reasonably priced for what you get, still ain’t cheap. If you can settle for merely impressive performance

Bottom Line

If you can’t survive without the top-of-the-line graphics performer, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 is your life-support system. But if you don’t have a really huge monitor, your best bet is still a fast single-GPU card.
Pros

Fastest graphics card out there. Reasonable power consumption. Priced fairly for what you get.
Cons

A fair price doesn’t mean a cheap one.

pcmag.com