The Fastest graphics card on the Earth: nVidia’s GeForce GTX 296

nVidia for long has been the hottest brand as far as developing graphics cards goes. Always promising high performance, it has seldom disappointed the ardent gaming society. ATI Radeon on the other hand has been close but lagging for last few years. Some time back though, it launched its first “two-chips-on-one board” card HD 4870 X2 which helped it slip slightly ahead of its only competition in the market, nVidia. It still raised a few eyebrows and gave way to many speculations on how nvidia will react to this move from ATI. nVidia inevitably had to launch its own graphics card with two chips on one board and it was officially launched on 8th January at the beginning of this year. As speculated (expected would be a more suitable word here) it has beaten ATI in performance and speed pretty convincingly (yet again?).

GTX 296 is definitely the fastest graphics card on the planet as promoted by nvidia itself. This latest baby from nVidia uses two GTX 280 chips on the same card. It still isn’t practically equal to two GTX 280’s with full power as the clock speed for these chips has been lowered to the same as for GTX 260. nVidia’s method to implement two chips together is also pretty interesting. The approach is completely different from ATI. The nVidia GTX 280 has two complete graphics cards in mirror image - with the main Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) chips facing each other - which are then sandwiched together using a HeatSink Fan (HSF) filling, resulting in this delicious piece of artifact.

Two chips on one board would definitely provide escalated performance but heating will be a big issue here. nVidia GTX 296 being the fastest graphics card yet, is sure to burn a deep hole in your pocket as well. But then, quality gaming doesn’t come cheap.