The guys in green don’t kid around with their GPU architectures. Neither have they been sparing the horsepower when it comes to creating uber powerful GPU cores. The GTX 280 has a decidedly Bugatti Veyron approach to it’s processing power and just like the car, it goes all out – a near 90 percent in SPs over it’s predecessor, the 8800 GTX, a 512 but memory bus connected to a whopping 1 GB of GDDR3 RAM, clocked at just above 2.2 GHz. All this makes the GTX 280 extremely capable and the brute force approach works well for NVIDIA – the GTX 280 is furiously fast, as our tests will show. In fact it’s the fastest single GPU card on the planet.

Features:

There are four cards based on the GTX 280 GPU – one each from ASUS, Zotac, XFX and POV. All these cards sport the default NVIDIA reference coolers with their own fancy, colorful stickers. Except for the POV GTX 280, the others were factory over clocked to 670 MHz core speeds, 602 MHz being the default clock speed for this GPU. Shockingly, only ZOTAC bundled a game with their card – GRID is reasonably new game. They also bundle an HDMI adapter as does POV. ASUS and XFX, the two old players miss out on a trick here.

Performance:

At similar clocks, as expected, the three GTX 280s from ASUS, XFX and ZOTAC perform quite similarly, and there’s a very small advantage going to the XFX card for some reason, but to be honest this advantage is never more than 1.5 percent all the games. The POV GTX 280 cannot keep yp with this over clocked trio, and understandably trails them a small margin. Of particular interest is Crysis, which is taxing at anything above 1600 x 1200 pixels. For the record, XFX GX 280 ZDD9 is the fastest GTX 280 card in the comparison.