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EVGA GTX 285 FTW (For the Win) happily runs at 720MHz

by on02 March 2009

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Review: GTX 285 bordering with impossible clocks

 

Today our focus will be solely on speed, as our lab welcomes the fastest single GPU card around – the GTX 285 For the Win (FTW). After GTX 285 card with its 55nm GT200 processor hit the market, a somewhat interrupted GTX 280 overclocking race continued. In case you didn’t know, GTX 280’s successor is exactly the GTX 285, and the difference is the newer, smaller and cooler GPU. The new card allows for higher maximum clocks, and EVGA followed it up with their FTW card. The FTW’s core runs at 720MHz, which is 118MHz and 72MHz higher than GTX 280 and reference GTX 285 clocks, respectively. Our guest today is Geforce GTX 285 For the Win card, and it rightfully deserves its title.

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This is the first time we’ve seen GPUZ showing such high clocks of a GTX 285/GTX 280 card. EVGA pushed all the GTX 285 FTW components to their max, and we see that the memory got juiced up from reference 1242MHz (2484) to 1386MHz (2772MHz) – GPUZ read the memory clocks wrong, and it also resulted in wrong memory bandwidth readout. The card’s memory bandwidth is up from reference 158.9GB/s to 177.4GB/s. EVGA’s portal lists the card’s memory clocks as 1386MHz (2772MHz), and that’s what you’ll be getting if you buy this card.

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The card features 16 Hynix (H5RS5223CFR-N3C) memory chips, 1024MB of memory with 512-bit memory interface in total.

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You might’ve expected some kind of special cooling for this turbo-fast card, but there was simply no need for it. Reference cooling does a good job and it doesn’t run too loud, so EVGA decided to keep it around. It’s a dual slot cooler that covers the entire front of the card, and features a fan on towards the end and air outlets on the I/O panel.

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Still, not all GT200 chips are capable of stable operation at 720MHz. We found out that EVGA handpicks the chips, and only the crème of the crop end up on their FTW cards, whereas others are left to power some weaker models. However, 720MHz is not an easy feat, even with 55nm GT200 chips.

The GT200 core features 240 shader processors, 32 ROPs and a large 1GB GDDR3 frame buffer, enabling the card to chew up newer games at high resolutions. The following page shows how much faster than reference, the Geforce GTX 285 FTW really is.


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Last modified on 02 March 2009
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