It looks like there's a new speed king in town, with the launch of a new flagship desktop graphics card from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 295. This is the successor to the 9800 GX2 in the dual GPU video card segment and aims to deliver a crushing performance blow to the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 with a pair of 55nm GT200B GPUs in a single-card, dual-slot configuration.
The GTX 295 features 480 stream processors and 1792MB of GDDR3 memory in total, with core and memory clocks of 576MHz and 1998MHz, respectively, and a 448-bit memory bus. Essentially, the GeForce GTX 295 looks like a pair of GeForce GTX 280s on a single card but using the GTX 260 core clock and memory speeds, as well as the GTX 260's narrower memory interface. The new card is already available through multiple third-party board makers and should retail for an estimated retail price of $499. Check out some reviews over at HotHardware, PC Perspective and Legit Reviews - expect our own take in the coming days.
In related news, Nvidia also announced that the GTX 285 should arrive later this month for $399 to compete with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 (?), along with a pair of mobile chipsets in the GeForce 100M series for both mid-range and budget notebooks.