gtx 285 vs 295

Currently trying to decide which the best card is in this upgrade. I'm going from 2x8800gts sli and wanted to know a few things about these cards. My rig is an e8400 oc'd to 3.8ghz with 4gb ram etc. Will the 295 be too much of a bottleneck? I intend on playing games at 1920 x 1200 resolution on a 24" screen. I want the highest settings I can get as well. My current setup is decent for today's games, although sometimes during high action I can get a noticeable slowdown. Also wanted to know, is the gtx 295 considered SLI to the operating system? Or does the OS recognize it as a single gfx card, but you get the performance of SLI setup? One last thing is with my current sli setup, there is this annoying bug in World of warcraft you cannot run the game in windowed mode without suffering a 40% fps drop, and if you happen to get get pop up warnings during gaming you get a little stutter while that happens. ( when my virus program updates it informs me via a little bubble pop up). Would I also have the same problems with the gtx295? Any help greatly appreciated as always.

if you want highest you can get then a 295.. assuming the games you play play nice with SLI.

295 = SLI is all it is, 2 card screwed together with an SLI bridge

WoW does not like SLI.

Yea I am leaning toward the 295 atm as I want highest settings + AA max etc. Is there anyway to disable SLI in game profiles, or pretty much have to open control panel and disable SLI everytime I want to play wow ?

Been doing some more research. I thought the gtx 260 were basically re-branded 9800gtx cards? Looking at some benchmarks, it looks like the gtx 260 in SLI are at around the same fps on games maxed or even higher then a gtx 295. Two 260's run about 200 ea, whereas the 295 are about 500. Am I missing something?

Ok The GTX295 is pretty much 2 GTX260's sandwiched together on 1 card. It is more along the lines of say 2 GTX270's on 1 card. As far as the 9800GTX vs the GTX260. The GTX260 is not a rebranded 9800GTX in no way shape or form.
So from what i just told you you can get 1 GTX295 and be equal to the 2 GTX260's in SLI. Then you can get another295 and run that for quad SLI and it would be like running 4 GTX260's in quad SLI which is not possible.

liftedcj7on44s said:

Ok The GTX295 is pretty much 2 GTX260's sandwiched together on 1 card. It is more along the lines of say 2 GTX270's on 1 card. As far as the 9800GTX vs the GTX260. The GTX260 is not a rebranded 9800GTX in no way shape or form.
So from what i just told you you can get 1 GTX295 and be equal to the 2 GTX260's in SLI. Then you can get another295 and run that for quad SLI and it would be like running 4 GTX260's in quad SLI which is not possible.

Click to expand...

Actually the GTX295 is 2x285's in sli, not 260's. It does have the memory and memory bandwidth of the 260 though

It's the nVidia GTS250 that is a rebranded 9800GTX.

The GTX 295 has the memory volume and frequency of two GTX 260 cards yet the shader processor power of two GeForce GTX 280 cards.

ah thanks for the clarification . I remember reading an article about the 250s, thought it was 260 though. I like the idea of getting one 295 now, then one later when the price comes down. Do games that support regular sli also support quad sli? Sounds pretty hot.

Yes those games should be fine.

You will find that most modern games work with quad sli nearly as good as they do with just two GPU's. And things will only improve with future games.

If you have the money then why not, go with a GTX 295, but they run very hot from what I've read, better make sure that the fan speed is faster than default during gaming, for example forced to 70% or 80% speed instead of it going automatically to say only 50% or 60% to ensure that you won't have over-heating issues.

If you got cash, GTX295 ftw, the most powerful single card solution atm...

I would wait to see if they sort the microstutter problem out first before getting a 295GTX.
see these links from another thread to see what I mean

I don't get any microstuttering on my GTX295, usually only happens with quad sli. Temps do get high, I get 87C when gaming with 24C ambient 100% fan speed with clocks in sig...