NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Cards by EVGA and PNY

The Test System

The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. ATI CATALYST 8.5 drivers were used on all the Radeon HD graphics cards and NVIDIA Forceware 175.16 WHQL drivers were used on all GeForce graphics cards except for the GeForce GTX 280 series cards as they used Forceware 177.34 drivers. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Hydro Copper 16 GPU-Z Screen Shot:

The PNY GeForce GTX 280 GPU-Z Screen Shot:

The Video Cards:

• EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Hydro Copper 16 (670MHz/2430MHz)
• PNY GeForce GTX 280 (602MHz/2214MHz)
• XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 (600MHz/2000MHz)
• XFX GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
• DiamondRadeon HD 3870 X2 – 1GB (825MHz/1.800GHz GDDR3)

All of the video cards were tested on our Intel X38 Express Test platform, which is loaded with the latest and greatest hardware. The Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770 ‘Yorkfield’ processor was used for testing as it proved to be the best desktop processor when it comes to game performance. The test system was also loaded with 4GB of memory and water cooled to ensure throttling of the processor or memory wouldn’t cause any issues. The Corsair PC2-9136C5 memory kit was run at 1066MHz with 5-5-5-15 2T memory timings.

Intel Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core 2 Quad QX9770	Click Here
Motherboard	Gigabyte X38-DQ6	Click Here
Memory	4GB Corsair PC2-9136C5	Click Here
Video Cards	See Above	Click Here
Hard Drive	Western Digital SATA RaptorX	Click Here
Cooling	Corsair Nautilus 500	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair HX620W	Click Here
Operating System	Windows Vista Ultimate	Click Here

Now that we know exactly what the test system is, we can move along to performance numbers. It should be noted that since both Palit and XFX use the same PCB, BIOS, Memory IC’s, Clock Speeds and cooling solutions we put the cards at the same data point. There is no performance difference between the two cards.