MaximumPC 2008 09

S

porting almost the same confi guration

as the reference design we previewed

last month, BFG’s GeForce GTX 280 de-

livers amazing performance with the second-

generation DirectX 10 chipset from Nvidia. It

soundly spanks ATI’s new 4870, as well as all

but the dual-GPU graphics solutions from the

previous generation—and even against those,

the GTX 280 wins all but a few benchmarks.

The real question we’re asking is, Do we need

this much power?

Luckily for Nvidia, the answer is yes. The

company’s GT200 GPU, which forms the heart

of the GeForce GTX 280 and 260 boards, is a

great performer, despite its massive foot-

print and huge energy requirements. BFG

overclocked the GPU core ever so slightly—it

runs at 615MHz—while the GDDR3 memory

ticks along at a stock 1107MHz. The GTX

280 features 240 stream processors running

at 1350MHz—a touch more than double the

GPU’s core speed.

It’s not surprising that the GTX 280 fares

so well against older Nvidia cards; far more

interesting is its performance compared with

the new Radeon HD 4870, which streets for

about half the GTX 280’s $660 list price. The

good news for Nvidia is that the 280 is faster

across all our benchmarks than a single 4870

board. However, the ATI card delivers as much

as 80 percent of the performance of the single

GTX board at a much lower price. Still, despite

ATI’s accomplishment, the GeForce GTX 280 is

the fastest single videocard you can buy today.

The GTX 280 features all the great

video-processing capabilities of the

9000-series Nvidia boards—it accelerates

the decode of H.264, MPEG-4, and MPEG-2

videos and supports HDCP and dual-link DVI.

Before you rush out and purchase a GTX

280 board, make sure your system supports

its power requirements. This is the fi rst

single-GPU board we’ve tested that requires

both a 6-pin and 8-pin PCI Express power

connector, and you need to make sure your

power supply is up to snuff. We recommend

a 650W PSU to run a single card—potential

SLIers will need at least a 1000W supply. You

can fi nd a list of compatible PSUs at http://

tinyurl.com/2klo8h. –W I L L S M I T H

BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC 1GB

The fi rst fully cooked GeForce GTX 280 we’ve tested is hot stuff!

BFG’s GTX 280 board is the

fastest single videocard

we’ve ever tested.

VERDICT

$660, http://www.bfgtech.com

9

Faster than previous-

gen SLI in some tests.

Runs Crysis in very

high mode.

Hot, loud, power-

hungry design may

force a PSU upgrade.

BFG9000

BFG GEFORCE GTX 280 OC 1GB

BIO FORCE GUN

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Crysis 15.9 9.3

3DMark 2006 Game 1 46 34

3DMark 2006 Game 2 45.5 36.7

Vantage Game 1 15.5 10.7

Vantage Game 2 19.9 9

Company of Heroes 48.7 39.6

World in Conflict 32 28

Best scores are bolded. Cards are tested using an Intel Core 2 Extreme running at 2.93GHz with 2GB of Corsair DDR2 memory. All benchmarks

are run at 1920x1200, with 4x AA and 16x anisotropic filtering. Crysis is run at very high settings, 3DMark Vantage is run in Extreme mode.

BENCHMARKS

74 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|SEP 08 |www.maximumpc.com

GeForce GTX 280 Radeon 4870