Just when we thought that ATI was regaining their lost pride, Nvidia hits back with the release of the GTX 275. With the launch of the new card, Nvidia finally decides to move up the ladder in the mid-range segment by opting for a smaller manufacturing process. This not only decreases the power consumption of the GPU but also generates less heat. So does the GTX 275 have what it takes to go up against ATI's HD 4890?

Features
The GTX 275 is based on a 55 nm manufacturing process and employs a total of 240 stream processors operating on a 448-bit interface. The core is clocked at 663 MHz with shaders operating at 1404 MHz. It also uses a total of 896 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1134 MHz. As with all 200¬series cards from Nvidia the transistor count remains the same at 1.4 billion. One of the main advantages that Nvidia has, right from the 8-series cards upwards, is the implementation of CUDA which is designed to offload intensive tasks from the CPU such as Video encoding, file compression and most important of all the ability to handle physics in games.

Featuring a dual slot design the GTX 275 from Zotac sports the same reference design. Powering up the card are two 6-pin PCle connectors that draws 180W of power when idle and touches 340W on load. The rear panel sports two DVI ports along with an S-video port.

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Bundled with the card you'll find a DVI-HDMI as well as a DVi-VGA converter, two Molex to PCIe power adapter and a driver disk. In addition you also get a copy of the game Grid and for those who would like to benchmark their card can make use of 3DMark Vantage Advanced.

Performance
The card sailed through 3DMark Vantage with a score of 11016, that's 1278 points more than what the HD 4890 could achieve. But when you compare the overall scores of game benchmarks both cards were almost neck and neck with the GTX 275 leading the way throughout the tests. But then again the lead was just about 5 fps more.

The only place where Nvidia lost out to ATI was when it came to the power consumption of the card. Compared to the HD 4890, the card consumes an extra 30W when idle and a whopping 93 W of power on load. That's almost 200 W of power consumed when in SLI. Which is a considerable amount bearing in mind that both the GTX 275 and the Radeon HD 4890 cards are built on the 55 nm architecture, plus the difference in scores are not significantly high. Even when compared to the GTX 260 the performance gains are not phenomenal and even though the GPU is built on a larger die size, power consumption is still 30W (load) lower than the GTX 275.