Gainward GTX 295 1792MB and Gigabyte GV-N295-18I-B: PCB Design and Specifications

We gave you a detailed description of the new GeForce GTX 295 in our Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum review. These two graphics cards also share Nvidia’s reference design, so there is no need for us to describe them. You can just refer to the mentioned review. The cards only differ with the picture on the cooler casing. Our sample of the Gainward card has no sticker at all, but the retail version will have a sticker with the same picture as on the card’s box.

The new GeForce GTX 295 resembles the GeForce 7900 GTX externally due to the characteristic design of the cooler with a central 80mm fan. The plastic casing is secured with locks and can be easily removed. Then you can see that the cooler actually consists of two separate heatsinks, one for each GPU.

Following the latest trends, each heatsink has a copper base that contacts with the GPU surface and is connected with heat pipes to the aluminum heatsink consisting of thin aluminum plates. The hot air from the left heatsink is exhausted out of the system case whereas the hot air from the right heatsink goes in the opposite direction, right into the interior of the computer, and may worsen the temperature of the other system components.

If you take off the heatsinks and remove the cooler’s base, you will see the following:

The power circuit of the new GeForce GTX 295 consists of two 3-phase voltage regulators based on Renesas R2J20651NP integrated packs and controlled by Analog Devices ADP3192A chips. Two single-phase voltage regulators are responsible for the memory chips. These regulators are based on integrated packs that combine power MOSFETs and drivers.

Power is connected via 6- and 8-pin connectors. The 8-pin power cable must be plugged in. Otherwise the card won’t start, reporting a power problem with the LED on its mounting bracket. This protection can still be easily bypassed by closing the two outermost pins in the 8-pin connector and plugging a PCIe 1.0 power cable in. In this case, it is necessary that the PSU had a sufficiently high load capacity of the +12V power rail. Nvidia recommends using 680W or higher PSUs, but this recommendation seems to be an overstatement for a single GeForce GTX 295.

The GPUs and memory chips of the graphics cards from Gainward and Gigabyte are clocked at the frequencies of the reference sample, i.e. 576/1242MHz for the GPU and 1008 (2016) MHz for the memory. Each GPU is equipped with a dedicated 896MB bank of GDDR3, and it is 896 megabytes of memory that 3D applications can access due to the specifics of today’s multi-GPU technologies. The memory buses are 448 bits wide.

We tried to overclock both cards and achieved the following results:

Gainward GTX 295 1792 MB

Gigabyte GV-N295-18I-B

The Gigabyte is somewhat better at overclocking, but the difference is negligible. The frequency growth is higher with both cards than with the Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum.

Each card is equipped with two DVI-I ports, one S/PDIF input and a MIO connector. We need the latter as we want to check out two GeForce GTX 295 in SLI mode. Before we do that, we will check out the noise and power consumption of such a tandem.