Hey all, I found out about a month ago nVidia released their GTX 285 and GTX 295 cards, which were apparently announced earlier. I had no idea till i logged onto umart one day and "hey presto!".

My question is: Does anyone know how to follow the release of up and coming graph cards? And further, As the 295 essentially has 2x260's on it, is there a 2x280 or 2x295 on the way?

RSS feeds for The Inquirer, The Register, Tomshardware and Anandtech are a good start for rumourfiles :)

Kinda depends really... unless you plan to buy overseas, it could be months before any make it to australian retailers.

2x295 card. LOL.

haha, i meant 2x285, but f*** it... why stop there

SLI (and the 4870X2/GTX295) is still totally dodgy, they haven't worked out how to actually program drivers to effectively process rendering with 2 chips in parallel so they basically have to program drivers for each game individually. At least nVidia actually gets their drivers out quickly, as opposed to ATi, but either way it seems like too much bother and IMO is really just getting in the way of them actually having to design better architectures.

^ various benchmarks beg to differ with your theory kos. SLI seems to be working quite well in most parts, not that I use it cause I don't give a s***.

follow up to this, if i'm going to go and buy a new video card on the weekend - what is the best bang for buck?

under $500 and not interested in doing sli or anything fancy - just a good current vid card

actually better yet, does this mean my video card is screwed or is it just css?

http://unix.org.au/~brett/images/what-the.jpg

For under $500 you have two options

An ATI 4870 1gig between $400 and $450

or a Nvidia GTX 260 896 mb at comparable prices.

I can only comment on the ATI card. I got an HIS 4870 1gig and I'm rapped with it.
Playing Crysis at 1920x1200 on my 24" screen all settings on highest but no AA is very playable 95% of the time,but this is a tough test for a card in this price range all other games it handles with ease.

This should narrow it down for you a bit, just read a few reviews you can't go wrong with either choice really.

I have only bought Nvidia up till this card.
So far I am very pleased with ATI drivers, the 17 FPS'ers I have installed from the most resent back to Q1 and a few RTS have had no issues at all, even troublsome games like Fallouy3 and Farcry2 are no problem.

4870x2 2gig kicks dick best card ever + drivers but yea price sux now the aussie dollar is falling

- teq just a guess but your card might be overheating, check fan? prob borked tho

last edited by d[o_0]b at 20:47:16 27/Jan/09

actually better yet, does this mean my video card is screwed or is it just css?

http://unix.org.au/~brett/images/what-the.jpg

You should look into weather your case has adequate air circulation, this could be heat related in which case a higher performance card will probably be worse.

Do you get the problem only with CS?
Only after prolonged use?
All the time with a lot of different games?
Only during a hot spell?

yeah i pulled it all apart and removed any dust etc from it
i think if it is the vid card the damage is done, because even with the aircon blowing directly on it - its still doing it

4870 is pretty much what i've been told a few places now, guess i'll give it a go

I'd much prefer a Nvidia Ion than a top of the range nvidia card. Just wish they'd hurry up and release them.

4870x2 is still better than gtx295 check:

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php

gtx's are s*** only got one cos the x2's were OOS!

Mmmmm no...