The guys in green don't kid around with their GPU architectu'res. Neither have they been sparing the horsepower when it comes to creating, libel' powerful GPU cores. The GTX 280 has a decidedly Bugatti Veyron approach to its processing power, and just like the car it goes all out a near 90 per cent in SPs over its predecessor, the 8800GTX, a 512-bit memory bus connected to a whopping 1 GB of GDDR3 RAM, clocked at just above 2.2 GHz. All this makes the GTX280 extremely capable and the brute force approach works well for NVIDIA the GTX 280 is furiously fast, as our tests will show. In fact it's the fastest single GPU card on the planet.

Features
We received four cards based on the GTX 280 GPU one each from ASUS, ZOTAC, XFX and POY. All these cards sport the default NVIDIA reference coolers with their own fancy, colourful stickers. Except for the POV GTX 280, the others were all factory over clocked to 670 MHz core speeds, 602 MHz being the default clock for this GPU. Shockingly, only ZOTAC bundled a game with their card - GRID is a reasonably new game. They also bundle an HDMI adapter, as does POY. ASUS and XFX, the two old players miss out on a trick here.

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Performance
At similar clocks, as expected, the three GTX 280s from ASUS, XFX and ZOTAC perform quite similarly, and there's a very small advantage going to the XFX card for some reason; but to be honest this advantage is never more than 1.5 per cent in all the games. The POV GTX 280 cannot keep up with this overclocked trio, and understandably trails them a small margin. Of particular interest is Crysis, which is taxing at anything above 1600 x 1200 pixels with DX10 effects turned on. None of these cards could reach the magic 30 fps mark shocking. If you want comfortable frames, you will have to lower your game resolution. UT3 proves to be CPU limited with such powerful cards, and any of these are overkill for this game. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. proves no match for the 240 SPs working in tandem, and yields 100+ fps for all practical resolutions. Company Of Heroes is also very playable, and will give 100+ fps at any resolution. World In Conflict is another CPU limited game, and we recommend a quad core processor our GTX 280s weren't able to crunch out any more than 35 fps. F.E.A.R. doesn't give the GTX 280 any issues, but this is an older game that scales quite well, and we were surprised seeing it slowing these cards to just above 100+ fps. For the record, XFXs GX-280ZDD9 is the fastest GTX 280 card in the comparison.