Pros & Cons
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- Fastest card on the market, relatively low idle power use.
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- Very expensive, high power use under load, requires a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 Specs
| GPU Engine Clock Speed: | 602 |
| Graphics Memory: | 512 |
| Memory Clock Speed: | 2.2 |
| No. DVI Output(s): | 2 |
| No. VGA Output(s): | 1 |
| RAMDAC Speed: | 1107 |
| System Interface: | PCIe |
1.4 billion transistors. Just let that number sink in for a little while. One point four billion transistors. That's how big the GTX 200 GPU at the heart of Nvidia's new high-end graphics cards is. To put that in perspective, Intel's latest 45nm quad-core CPUs with 12MB of cache is about 820 million transistors—70% less.
Nvidia won't share the precise size of their chip in square millimeters, but they're still on a 65nm manufacturing process. The 65nm G92 processor used in so many recent Nvidia graphics cards squeezed about half as many transistors (754 million) into a chip that was about 330mm^2. Even with improved transistor density, it's a sure bet that the GTX 200 chip is nearly 600mm^2, if not bigger.
That's one enormous chip, and you sure don't get a whole lot of them on a wafer from the fabrication plant. If we assume a 300mm (12-inch) wafer size, that's less than 100 dies per wafer, assuming normal margins. In other words, it's going to go into some expensive products. Expensive, fast products, one would hope.
The two products built using the GTX 200 chip are the GeForce GTX 280, which fully enables all the chip's capabilities, and the less expensive GeForce GTX 260, the so-called "salvage chip" that has some of the chip's parts disabled (typically, this is done to get use out of chips with small defects that would otherwise have been thrown out).
No doubt about it, Nvidia is aiming straight at the high-end with this product launch. With price tags estimated at $650 for the GTX 280 cards and $400 for the GTX 260 cards, these single-GPU cards already occupy the rarified air typically reserved for dual-GPU cards. Does the performance match up to the sticker shock?
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