The Striker - NVIDIA's New GeForce GTX 275

Conclusion

Decisive Counter-attack

As the benchmarks show, the GeForce GTX 275 is more than a capable performer. Clearly a notch above the GTX 260+, it also has enough oomph to trouble even the GeForce GTX 285, which says quite a bit on its potential. More importantly, however, it is substantially faster against its intended competitor - the Radeon HD 4890.

Then came the knockout roundhouse punch after a successful parry - the price. NVIDIA tells us that the recommended retail price of the GTX 275 will be an astonishing US$249. This makes it even cheaper than some of the existing GTX 260+ cards on the market. At that price, the GTX 275 is also about US$100 less than the GTX 285, which is not that much faster. This is truly great value for money.

However, the GTX 275 is not without its shortcomings. Most notably, it is extremely hot. In fact, it is one of the hottest cards we've ever tested. This means a setup with adequate and ample ventilation is required, lest you want your whole system to go up in flames. Another thing that we didn't like was how power-hungry it was. Fortunately, these problems are rectifiable and as noted in the review, are quite likely due to poor power management implementation. We are hopeful that NVIDIA will have these problems fixed once they finalized their new Release 185 drivers and we'll certainly check to see if these aspects have improved.

To sum up, NVIDIA has come up with something truly special - not really because of the hardware, but more in part of proper positioning. Not only was their response to ATI's new Radeon HD 4890 quick, it was also decisive. Furthermore, let us not forget NVIDIA's support for PhysX-enabled games and CUDA-enabled software. We might make fun of NVIDIA for renaming and rehashing products, but when something as enticing as this SKU comes along, we've nothing but recommendations. And taking everything into account, we think it is not superfluous to say that the GeForce GTX 275 is perhaps the best value-for-money high-end graphics card we've seen yet. Now we really hope it stays that way in retail as well and not get marked up radically as we've noted in some past instances due to shortages.