GTX285 battle, Asus versus Gigabyte

THESE DAYS, the memory capacity on a graphics card often comes close to the amount of main system memory. Many high end PCs still have only 4GB or maybe 6GB of RAM, while there are quite a few graphics cards that have 2GB RAM on board. Do a TriSLI or TriFire with them, and you've got 6GB of graphics memory, the same amount as the RAM in a top end!

Put aside the fact that the SLI and CrossFire data duplication means that a lot of that memory is not an actual storage gain, but 1GB or 2GB of GPU store is still a sizable amount of memory. Knowing that 1GB of RAM is a decent amount of storage, is there any benefit to be had by jumping a step higher to 2GB, even in our favourite synthetic benchmarks that are always quick to use such enhancements?

Here the INQ got two good GeForce GTX285 factory overclocked cards to test that very issue. The first card is an Asus ENGTX285 TOP, a nice 1GB reference design card with a factory default overclocked GPU running at 670MHz versus the standard 648MHz. Against it goes its rival Gigabyte GTX285 2GB card with a Gigabyte-made "2oz copper" PCB and its factory default overclocked GPU running at 660MHz. The shader clock runs at 1505MHz, while the GPU memory runs at GDDR3-2400 speed.

Both cards were tested on a Core i7 975 system using Gigabyte's EX58 Extreme mainboard and 6GB of GEIL high speed DDR3-2133 memory, running Windows Vista 64bit with 3Dmark Vantage. Both performance and extreme modes were run.

As expected, there is near zero impact in the Performance mode with its standard 1280x1024 resolution and basic effects. In fact, the slightly slower clock of the Gigabyte card shows in the scores. The Extreme mode shows some benefit though, but not as much as the 512MB to 1GB memory size jump. Nevertheless the larger memory does more than offset the slower clock here. And, the Gigabyte card can overclock too.

In summary, you get double the memory size and a touch of extra performance for a bit more dosh. The 2GB card will show more of its extra value when paired up with a really large screen (1600x1200, 1920x1200, 2048x1536 or even 2560x1600) and when higher antialiasing and other effects are enabled. Both cards are fast, pre-overclocked models with good performance anyway, so the extra memory is your own preference. And, both of these cards can be overclocked beyond the factory set defaults, so be on the lookout for another story on that!

And yes, for all of you home supercomputing buffs who'd like to use Nvidia CUDA GPU computing with large memory without spending too much money on their Tesla cards, the Gigabyte 2GB offering is a nice fit. After all, GPGPU acceleration speed benefits are usually limited by what you can fit in the GPU memory and the doubled memory size allows a system to work with much larger datasets, without having to go back through the slow PCI-e connection to fetch data from the system RAM as frequently. µ