Gigabyte GV-N295 and Gainward GTX 295 Summary

Both graphics cards are exact copies of Nvidia reference design and differ from one another and the previously reviewed Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum only by the stickers on the cooler casing, package and bundled accessories. If you don’t really care about the accessories, then you can go for any of these three graphics cards – their all come with not too many goodies. Only Gigabyte GV-N295 comes with Molex → PCI express power adapters. Gigabyte solution overclocks a little better, but overclocking is in fact quite unpredictable and the same graphics card from the same manufacturer may demonstrate better or worse results in your particular case.

Highs:

• Today’s best performance among single graphics cards;
• Outperforms ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 in most tests;
• Wide range of supported FSAA modes;
• Minimal effect of enabled FSAA on performance;
• PhysX acceleration support in the GPU;
• Hardware HD-video decoding support;
• S/PDIF sound over HDMI;
• Increased energy-efficiency;
• Lower heat dissipation;
• Low level of generated noise;
• Very efficient cooling system;
• Good overclocking potential.

Lows:

• Yields to Radeon HD 4870 X2 in the amount of video memory available to applications;
• No DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support;
• Incomplete hardware support of VC-1 decoding;
• No integrated sound core;
• Maximum performance may depend on software support.