Conclusion

As we already noted in our previous reviews, the GeForce GTX 275 is an excellent product that is but slightly inferior to the GeForce GTX 285 while having a much lower price, which makes it far more appealing for the end-user. When it was announced, the only noted drawback was the smaller amount of graphics memory due to the memory bus reduction from 512 to 448 bits. As a result, the new card had 896MB of memory as opposed to the GTX 285’s and the ATI Radeon HD 4890’s 1024MB. We predicted then that there would be versions of the card with GDDR3 chips of double capacity, i.e. with 1792 rather than 896MB of onboard memory. One such model has been tested in this review.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 275 1792MB is neither a revelation nor a disappointment. It is exactly like the ordinary GeForce GTX 275 with 896MB of memory in most games. You can see this in the summary diagrams.

The average advantage of the EVGA card over the reference GeForce GTX 275 is even less than 1% while the maximum gap is only about 2% (at 1920x1200 in Left 4 Dead). Thus, we can say that these cards are identical when it comes to playing modern games. The advantage is larger at 2560x1600, mostly thanks to Crysis Warhead, but the latter game is utterly unplayable on the GeForce GTX 275 irrespective of how much memory it has.

In the other cases, the reference GeForce GTX 275 is no worse than the EVGA card, delivering comfortable or acceptable performance in many games including Call of Duty: World at War, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2. Our overclocking attempt was far more fruitful: the overclocked EVGA proved to be faster than the GeForce GTX 285 in many games. The average performance gain was 8-12% depending on the resolution while the maximum average performance boost of 35% was achieved in Devil May Cry 4 at 1680x1050 and 1920x1200.

On the other hand, overclocking was really helpful in one case only: it made Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. more comfortable to play at 1920x1200.