ASUS EN GTX295 review - Overclocking, Conclusion
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 06 Apr 2009

With a full load temperature of 77 degrees outside a system case we didn’t want to push the card too much, but you can easily reach the GTX 285 speeds, with a fan running at 100%, which we do not recommend for the sake of your hearing. Or loss of it. Fortunately, while idling the card is very quiet, in part thanks to the downclock to 300 MHz. The memory is also downclocked, to just 100 MHz. The core temperature drops to less than 50 degrees.

As we can see, this is the fastest ‘single’ card currently available, with results right where you would expect them, between GTX 260 SLI and GTX 280 SLI. Unfortunately we do not have the GTX 285 SLI results, but since it’s basically just an overclocked GTX 280, you should add about 10% to those scores. ATI’s 4870X2 stays behind in all benchmarks we use, although there are some games that favor ATI in which it could approach the GTX 295 or even overtake it.

Testing a reference clocked card is not much fun - it’s a reference design. To be fair, we're still waiting for some custom GTX 295s. You get a feeling that you’ve seen it before, aside from the nice sticker of some knight/angel combo on an armored horse. The GTX 295 makes sense if you got a full HD monitor or more, so 19x12 or basically everything up from 22’’ to 30’’ screens. Below that there really isn’t that much need for the processing power of the two GTX 200 GPUs. Even with 16xAA option turned on, the card can pretty much breeze through all of the benchmarks at 16x10. The GTX 295 is not GTX 285 times two. In most games on most settings, it can deliver about 30-70% more performance, but that is the case with all multi GPU solutions. The ASUS model can get our recommendation, just as well as any other GTX 295 card, as they are all the same. For $500 or €450, it is not cheap, but it delivers a lot of power to your PC. Top end cards have never been great on the bang for buck front anyways.