The GTX 295 will be compared alongside the test results collected during the ‘GTX 285 AMP! Edition’ Review. This comprised of a pair of standard GTX 260's (65nm - 192 stream processor model) run both individually and in dual card SLi (both cards are identical to the reference NVidia design running at standard clocks) and the Zotac GTX 285 AMP! Edition.

Full spec of the test PC is:

CPU: AMD Phenom II 720 Tri-core @ 3.4ghz
Motherboard: ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Heatpipe
Memory: 8gb (4x 2gb) OCZ Platinum PC8000 DDR2
HDD: 320gb Samsung Spinpoint F1
Operating system: Vista 64 Business
GPU: 2x GTX 260's, Zotac GTX 285 AMP! Edition and Zotac GTX 295
PSU: Tagan Piperock 1100w (modular)
Cooling: Custom watercooling for CPU and motherboard chipset - GPU's all use their original stock cooling
Case: Mountain Mods - H2g0 enclosure



Initial testing was compiled using Futuremark's two most recent GPU benchmarking programs - the older 3DMark06 and their newest 3DMark Vantage. These were the newest patched versions at the time of the review.
(Note: In the case of 3DMark Vantage PhysX was enabled in the 'Nvidia Control Panel' since it was utilised in the test.)

The GTX 260 and GTX 285 GPU's were tested using NVidia's GeForce driver set - 182.50. The GTX 295 was tested using the newest GeForce 186.16 driver set.

Note: I did try both the 182.50 and 186.18 driver sets with the GTX 295 to test for any performance changes. I noticed a mix of marginally better and slightly worse performance between games which was interesting. I would say that the performance change wasn’t large enough to be considered important though.

I also considered the operating temperature of the cards - in use the GTX 295 idled warmer than the other cards and when fully loaded produced quite a bit more heat. To achieve full load temps i looped the Far Cry 2 long Ranch demo.