- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet - WIlliam Gibson
Asus Geforce GTX285 TOP on Intel Core i7
NVIDIA'S GTX295 dual-GPU brick may now be something of a rarity, if not a deadly assault weapon when it hits one's head. But the Green Goblin's mainstay high-end card, the GTX285, sounds like a far better deal: full speed GPU and memory bus without any shader number or bus width cuts, and fairly good SLI scaling for those still wanting more.
Before trying the SLI GTX285 dual combo myself, I took a quick look at the Asus Geforce GTX285 TOP, a carefully selected factory-overclocked spin from Taiwan's largest high-end PC component brand - its factory set clocks are 5 per cent higher than the reference, at 670 MHz GPU, 1.55 GHz shaders and 2.6 GHz GDDR3 memory.
The Core i7 965 at default 3.2 GHz on Asus P6T Deluxe Palm OC mobo (SLI capable) hosted the GPU. We ran the usual 3Dmark Vantage, and tested the card against the Asus GTX280 TOP, the previous single-GPU record holder with similar GPU OC speed but slightly slower 1.46 GHz shaders and 2.43 GHz RAM, as well as Asus HD4870X2 and Sapphire HD4870 Toxic 1 GB. A nice equalising point is that all GPUs here have the same per-GPU memory.
The next step is dual and triple SLI combinations. In the meantime, even a single card gives the Core i7 quite a bit of matching graphics oomph. µ
The Good
Pre overclocked big brand stuff
The Bad
Time for moving beyond reference cooling
The Ugly
Hogs two slots
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dual slot cooling that removes the hot air from the case is a plus in most instances.
Your reference rig is pretty pricey for the few extra FPS you obtain. The CPU alone is going for $1,000 at newegg. Why not compare this overpriced beast to a reality rig the rest of us would build such as mine. A Q9650 (quad core at 3.0GHz) with a single XFX GTX 285 on a matched (1333) front side bus Gigabyte MOBO. I say Gigabyte motherboard because the last two rigs I built (one for me, one for a friend) they worked flawlessly for me. I would be interested to see how many more FPS all that extra cash buys you.
Comparing CPU power the i7 does deliver for a price, 30FPS over my rig in Crysis. See here at Toms Hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/Crysis-1680x1050,818.html
But I am happy with my 132 FPS in the chart.
AMD still pwns Nvidia!
Call Charlie!
"dual slot cooling that removes the hot air from the case is a plus in most instances."
I wholeheartedly agree with Frank, and further, I would like to point out that ALL currently available aftermarket coolers for this card do NOT exhaust the hot air from the GPU out of the case.
NVidia's GTX 265 and 285 reference cooler is actually a very well designed unit. I was pleasantly surprised when I received mine. It is much quieter than both the HD4870 reference cooler and the older 9800GTX+ reference cooler, and is still quite capable of keeping the huge GTX 285 die at a reasonable temperature (under 70 deg celcius).
No I dont work for NVidia, but I do own a GTX 285 and wouldn't trade the reference cooler for anything else on the market right now.