EVGA GTX 295 1792MB GDDR3 Video Card Review

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Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead

For benching Left 4 Dead, we used a pre-recorded 5 minute timedemo taken on the Death Toll campaign during The Church mission. Framerates were captured with FRAPS.


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The EVGA GTX 295 makes a pretty good name for itself in Left 4 Dead but it is far from a clean sweep with the HD 4870 X2 pulling ahead every now and then.

 

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Need 4 Speed Undercover

Need 4 Speed Undercover

Benchmarking NFS: Undercover proved to be an interesting process but we finally decided on the Ocean and Wilson Circuit race for a worst case scenario benchmark run. The benchmark run involves running 4 laps of the circuit at the hardest difficulty setting with 7 other racers and a high traffic volume. The total amount of time usually ranged between 3:30 and 3:40 of gameplay time recorded in FRAPS.

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These may be the oddest results we have ever received in a review. The performance of the GTX 295 actually INCREASES as the resolution goes up to the point where it goes from dead last at lower resolution to kicking ass at higher res. Heck, even the framerate at 2560 x 1600 is higher than at 1680 x 1050. Nvidia has confirmed these findings so it looks like they are repeatable but man, if that doesn’t look odd I don’t know what does.

 

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Crysis Warhead (DX9)

Crysis Warhead (DX9)

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Once again, the scores here aren’t even close with the GTX 295 literally walking all over the HD 4870 X2 at every resolution.

 

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Crysis Warhead (DX10)

Crysis Warhead (DX10)

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Here the GTX 295 does very good as well…if you are only looking at average framerates. Since we take a look at both average AND minimum results, we are told a different story with this new Nvidia card really missing the mark in some cases.

 

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X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict

After playing through the game trying to find a suitable zone for benchmarking purposes, we finally gave up and began using the stand-alone benchmarking tool from Egosoft. Believe it or not, after over 20 hours playing X3: Terran Conflict, it seems the benchmarking tool combines the worst and best case scenarios of the game quite accurately. The minimum framerates you see here are the averages for the 4 sections of the benchmark.

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This game is still the territory of ATI since Nvidia obviously hasn’t got their SLI profiles set up correctly just yet. As such, the EVGA GTX 295 languishes near the bottom of the results.

 

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Extreme IQ Testing: GTX 295 vs HD 4870 X2

Extreme IQ Testing: GTX 295 vs HD 4870 X2

Naturally, when you spend over $500 on a graphics card, you want it to kick ass and take names at extremely high resolutions and image quality settings. In these following tests, we pitted the GTX 295 against the one card it hopesto beat to become the king of the hill. Let’s check out how it does.


Fallout 3

This is the first game we are testing here with 8xAA and things don’t go too well for the EVGA GTX 295 since the HD 4870 X2 is really able to put the hurt on. It looks like the 896MB of memory per core may be a limiting factor here.


Far Cry 2 DX9 / DX10

Making heads or tails out of these two results is next to impossible since they are at two different ends of the spectrum. On one hand we see the HD 4870 X2 winning in DX9 but when the DX10 rendering path is used, things turn around very quickly with the GTX 295 walking all over the ATI card.


Left 4 Dead

In Left 4 Dead, the GTX 295 is able to keep slightly ahead of the HD 4870 X2 when it comes to average framerates but the real story is in the minimum results.


Need For Speed Undercover

It seems the EVGA GTX 295 gets better and better as the resolution and IQ settings are increased in NFS: UC and this holds true in this test as well. It should be noted however that ATI has stated they do not yet have Crossfire set up in this game on the 8.12 drivers.


Crysis: Warhead DX9 / DX10

Well, well this is definitely interesting. It seems like the extra memory on the HD 4870 X2 is paying for itself in spades. Unfortunately, neither card could muster the performance to eke out playable performance at these settings so the win for ATI is somewhat hollow.

 

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Heat and Acoustics

Heat and Acoustics

Unfortunately, things get rather toasty around the GTX 295 since it is more than happy to spew massive amounts of heat back into your case. Even though the two cores idle at more than acceptable temperatures, the real story lies in the Load results. Both cores hit pretty higher temperatures even after a few minutes of load testing. This is expected due to the dual GPU nature of this card but we were somewhat hoping that the temperatures would be a bit more under control.

The temperatures only tell part of the story since the low idle results are brought to you by a fan profile that is far too aggressive. Our EVGA GTX 295 had its fan spinning at a constant 40% at idle which nearly drove me to distraction after a few hours. To make matters even worse, the fan speed increases exponentially as you play a game to the point where you will be looking high and low for some noise cancelling earbuds before long. If you are into silent computing, this card is definitely NOT for you. Heck, if you value your sanity you will want to experiment A LOT with the fan speed control.

 

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Power Consumption

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.

Let’s get right to it; the GTX 295’s idle power consumption is simply phenomenal even though it does stay above that of the 65nm GT 200-series cards. The peak load numbers we received puts this card above below the HD 4870 X2 in terms of efficiency which is definitely good news. That being said, we would not recommend you used anything under a good 650W power supply if you are running a GTX 295. If you choose to run two for some quad SLI action, we would suggest a 950W or higher unit.

Game Power Consumption

When it comes to actual gaming power consumption, the GTX 295 offers up a mixed bag of tricks to say the least. The high framerate it gives us in Dead Space proves to be a double edged sword since power consumption goes up as a result. Meanwhile, it trades blows with the HD 4870 X2 in other tests. All in all this is a bit disappointing considering Nvidia claimed their new card was more efficient than the competition across the board

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

In the current graphics card performance arena, there haven’t been many interesting developments for the last little while since both ATI and Nvidia seemed to be content to stay the course with their current crop of contenders. The GTX 295 show us that Nvidia is truly serious about recapturing the performance crown from ATI but the question that begs to be answered is: did they succeed? Well, I am going to have to say yes and no. The EVGA GTX 295 definitely seems to live up to the hype by displaying absolutely amazing framerates in the majority of the benchmarks which in itself would mean it is the fastest card on the planet, right? Not so fast because some of our Extreme IQ benchmarks showed performance that was less than optimal and illustrated one key area in which Nvidia could have improved this particular card: memory allocation. 2GB of memory may have put it head and shoulders above the HD 4870 X2…but we will never know and can only theorize about what the end results would have been. This doesn’t stop the GTX 295 from being the current card to beat but it does throw a bit of a cold towel into the Nvidia celebrations.

No matter which way I look at it, the GTX 295 has all the same limitations of any dual GPU card in that it is held hostage by the SLI profiles in games. If your favorite game doesn’t support SLI or vice versa, you may as well go ahead and buy a $300 card and be done with it while saving yourself a bucket load of cash. However, it should be mentioned right here and now that Nvidia has done a truly admirable job of making sure SLI is supported in as many games as possible.

While we are on the subject of performance, it is time to come clean about a little driver ATI sent our way shortly before this review went live. Basically, it is a multi-threaded beta driver tailored for their HD 4870 X2 in orderto increase performance in certain games. We didn’t use it since it is not and may never be available to the public. As you know, we use WHQL drivers unless the situation absolutely demands it and frown upon benchmarking with drivers that are not available to the public for existing cards. So, they weren’t used but who knows, they may be part of the 9.1 driver package so you may get to see their performance very soon.

Anyways, back to the GTX 295 and the growing pains associated with it since much like the HD 4870 X2, this card runs hot and it runs loud. Heat we can put up with to a certain extent but the noise this thing puts out even at idle is unacceptable to say the least. Its fan speed profile is far too aggressive but I guess that is what it takes to keep two GPU cores cool. Like we said; if you want silent computing, look elsewhere. It should also be mentioned that I was never able to get dual monitor support working so the Folding @ Home GPU2 client would recognize both GPUs. The system would hang during Vista’s boot cycle but don’t fear, Nvidia is still looking into the issue.

All in all, there is a lot to like about Nvidia’s GTX 295 but there are some major points of contention as well. There is no one-size-fits-all solution out there for those of you looking to buy a new GPU but if you are in the market for extremely good performance at ultra high resolutions with a lifetime warranty to boot, this card may be just what the doctor ordered.


Pros:

- Very good performance
- Single card solution for power users
- Great idle power consumption
- Lifetime warranty


Cons:

- Performance largely dependent on SLI profiles in a game
- Horribly loud
- Power hungry

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