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ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 1GB AMP Video Card
Introduction
It's a tough place to be, having six hundred dollars to spend on a single video card. It's rough, and if you're there, may God have pity on your soul. You're about to buy a GTX 280. Some of the glimmer has blown away; this is the fastest single-GPU card of all time, but HD 4000 is a whirlwind. It's all value, though, and the best has and will always require a price premium. NVIDIA people won't be dissuaded, and the GTX 280, despite competitive pressure, is selling well. A lot of work went into making this a new card, not a streamlined or overclocked G80 part. It's beastly, costly, and if you've any doubts about buying this card, they're warranted. Fortunately, you can know this: it's powerful, and there probably won't be anything like it for some time to come. ZOTAC has overclocked it, slapped their sticker on this card, and the rest goes like this:   The Card & Bundle Drinking deep from the metal-clasped well of GX2 inspiration, the GTX 280 is armored. There are no chinks in it, and air pulled into its massive fan will shoot out the back. The enameled carapace is flanged and enameled, increasing its surface area and mass: this card weighs two pounds. It's entire surface is a steely heat-spreader.     It's got two power connectors, and both need appropriate cabling to power up: the card requires its six-pin and eight-pin connections. There are adapter cables bundled, on six-pin-to-eight-pin, and one dual-4-pin-Molex-to-six-pin. (These hyphenations are getting ridiculous.)    Besides the manuals, warnings, and warranty info, there's also an audio cable and HDMI-out adapter, a VGA adapter, and a component/S-Video breakout cable. And a copy of the well-received racing game, GRID. If you liked Colin McRae's (R.I.P.) DIRT, you'll appreciate this title. Specifications and Setup All cards were benched on the same test platform with the recent drivers (April or newer). Test Computer Specifications 
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz
Asus Rampage Formula (Sponsored by Asus)
2GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2 800 @ 4-4-4-12 (Sponsored by Crucial)
Thermaltake Toughpower 1000 (Sponsored by Thermaltake)
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (Sponsored by Microsoft)Video Card Specifications Manufacturer's Website Graphics Processing Unit - NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 280 @ 602 MHz engine clock - 240 Processor Cores @ 1296 MHz - Dual 400 MHz RamDAC - Max. Resolution @ 2560 x 1600 - True 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with 16x full- screen anti-aliasing Memory - 1GB GDDR3 - 2214 MHz memory clock - 512-bit memory bus Bus Support - PCI Express 2.0 (compatible with 1.1) 3D Acceleration - Microsoft(R) DirectX(R)10 support - Unified Shader Model 4.0 - OpenGL 2.1 Features - NVIDIA PureVideo(TM) HD Technology - NVIDIA CUDA technology - NVIDIA PhysX ready - HDTV Ready - Vista(TM) Ready - NVIDIA SLI(TM) Ready - HDCP Compliant - Full HD 1080p compatible - Dual Link Dual DVI - RoHS Compliant
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle, Specs & Setup
Page 2: DirectX 10 Titles Page 3: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 4: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
2 User Comments 1 - Posted by
aireiq
on July 16, 2008 - 10:28 pm > The enameled carapace is flanged and enameled... I guess they call that truth in advertising.... 2 - Posted by
Blackened
on July 17, 2008 - 12:39 pm As of the publishing of this article you can find the GTX280 for roughly $470. At $600 this card is too expensive, but at the current price this card is a beast.
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