ZOTAC GeForce GTX285 and GeForce GTX295 Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

This tale of two cards has now drawn to a close, and we’ve discovered a few important things about the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition and the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 295. The first and most prominent of these truths is that to have the best performance in a video card, you have to be willing to spend a decent amount of money. Even then, your might not get what you’ve paid for. This is evident with the GTX 285. While it makes extra strides over it’s older brother, it doesn’t quite have the performance to make up for the price discrepancy.

As for the GTX 295, it really is in class all it’s own. You do accept having a certain degree of personal lunacy for purchasing such a card, so the financial lunacy isn’t much more of a stretch. Still it is (currently) the fastest graphics card available. The package ZOTAC adds to that cards makes it an even better consideration. The inclusion of a game, full benchmarking tool, and an HDMI cable are all nice additions to this premium package.

There are few issues that still manage to accompany these cards. The big one is of course the price to performance ratio for the GTX 285. It’s hard to justify this card when it only has a minor performance bump over the GTX 280. Hopefully the die shrink to 55nm that has been brought in with this new card will yeild some more interesting products. The GTX 295 can only muster a a couple gripes from me. The first is the immaturity of the drivers from NVIDIA. This isn’t their first time to the dance, so having problems running the benchmarks I want to run and having weird performance gaps when I do run them is somewhat annoying. That will still be eventually fixed. The other one is the difficulty in installing a 3rd party cooler, or more importantly a water block. That is an intrinsic problem with these dual GPU designs, so once again it’s ends up being a minor gripe as it’s not a fault of the card vendor.

In the end what we really have here is one card that is a incremental improvement, and one that is a full leap ahead. The GTX 285 is a good replacement for the GTX 280, and offers a decent performance increase over it’s older brother. The GTX 295 is just a monster the steps on everything in it’s path. Though I know this is only the latest release in a continuing cycle of video card revisions, I’m still going to award ZOTAC an Editors’ Choice for the GeForce GTX 295. As for the GTX 285, it’s a fast performer in its own right, and should give NVIDIA some breathing room in this current generation of video cards.

The Verdict: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition

Pros