EVGA Geforce GTX275 CO-OP PhysX Edition Review

[onethreehill]

NVIDIA and ATI dominate the market for gaming-oriented video cards. But neither company sells video cards directly to the consumer; rather, they produce "reference designs" that are manufactured by a number of "partners". Most partners simply produce the reference design and slap an identifying sticker on the card's cooler; although some might replace the reference design cooler with a quieter or more powerful solution, with few exceptions there's little to distinguish one partner's version of a specific card from another partner's version of the same card. EVGA breaks out of this rut with their EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition, model 012-P3-1178-TR, which combines NVIDIA GTS250 and GTX275 GPUs on the same card, and Benchmark Reviews takes it around the block to see what it's got.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=460&Itemid=72

[onethreehill]

Another review

All contemporary Nvidia solutions support PhysX, but in return some of the GPU resources are assigned to physics effects acceleration. Is it possible to avoid performance losses without adding more cards? EVGA’s answer is “yes”.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...oop-physx.html

[STEvil]

ATi does actually sell cards directly to the consumer.. guess they've never seen or heard of "BBATI"

[HeXploiT]

If it's not as fast as a gtx285 then Why would I buy this when I can get a GTX285 for cheaper?
Nvidia is marketing this the wrong way.

[Etihtsarom]

So this has 2 cores on it? Nvm. Sorry didnt read.

[autobot]

YES!!! Some more G92 goodness!

[Rattle]

fail card

[Sly Fox]

Oh EVGA... What are you doing...

[saaya]

Oh EVGA... What are you doing...

+1

EDIT: that pcb looks a bit like the fake fermi card... could it be...?

[josh1980]

Interesting product. I can see how this might make a good niche market of gamers that just "gotta" have PhysX support. It does appear to be a cost effective way to have PhysX for gaming. I'm not sure how much use this is going to be since Fermi is due out soon. If this had been released 6 months ago that would have been more impressive. Today, not so much. I'm not sure who would spend that kind of money for video graphics when Fermi is so close to launch.

[SKYMTL]

No folding benchmarks? This card IS able to fold on both cores at the same time or on just the G92 core while the GTX 275 is used for gaming. This makes for a pretty good combination for people with single PCI-E x16 slot mobos that want to fold and game at the same time.

[saaya]

Interesting product. I can see how this might make a good niche market of gamers that just "gotta" have PhysX support. It does appear to be a cost effective way to have PhysX for gaming. I'm not sure how much use this is going to be since Fermi is due out soon. If this had been released 6 months ago that would have been more impressive. Today, not so much. I'm not sure who would spend that kind of money for video graphics when Fermi is so close to launch.

more or less... 350$, so it costs the same as a seperate 275 and 250, but a 8800gt or gt220 will do just fine in physix and both costs 40$ less...
and most people probably who are thinking about getting this card are probably using a G92 based card right now, so for them it makes more sense to buy a gt200 card and then use their old vga as a physix card...

and yes, im really surprised it was launched today... i thought it was launched months ago

No folding benchmarks? This card IS able to fold on both cores at the same time or on just the G92 core while the GTX 275 is used for gaming. This makes for a pretty good combination for people with single PCI-E x16 slot mobos that want to fold and game at the same time.

good point... might be a good price perf option for people who are folding on gpus... but i dont think it will be a very interesting option... 260s are below 200$, so for 350$ you can probably buy 2... you need more pciE slots for that... but thats not really a problem nowadays with boards that have 7 pciE 16x slots and all

[zalbard]

Only really good for PhysX fans imo, but can't really blame the card since it meets the target.
Other than that it's not really impressive and I'd rather get GTX285 or 5850...

[SKYMTL]

but i dont think it will be a very interesting option... 260s are below 200$, so for 350$ you can probably buy 2... you need more pciE slots for that... but thats not really a problem nowadays with boards that have 7 pciE 16x slots and all

I actually know quite a few people who have retasked their P35 and older AM2boards for folding purposes and are looking closely at this card. Unfortunately though, in order to properly see its uses, reviewers and readers need to think "outside the box" so to speak. Articles such as these require study of the potenial future of a product instead of just plugging in the card and running a few benchmarks.

The idea is a sound one for gaming but unfortunately at this point PhysX has such a small library on the PC that a purchase like this would be wasted money from a purely gaming standpoint. Take Adobe Flash and the Photoshop GPU acceleration options while folding on a single card system for example.

However, like I said; Folding could be one option but in my opinion, the OpenCL capabilities of this card are what interest me the most. There are several physics and other apps that are being written to take advantage of two GPUs in an OpenCL environment. This means the uses for the Co-Op oculd reach pretty far beyond just Phys-X regardless of the marketing behind it.

[saaya]

potentially... maybe... yes... :P

[lkiller123]

Can we fold with it?

[SKYMTL]

Can we fold with it?

Yes. It takes a bit of work, but you can.

[onethreehill]

EVGA GeForce GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition against XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition: Do We Need Physics Onboard?
All contemporary Nvidia solutions support PhysX, but in return some of the GPU resources are assigned to physics effects acceleration. Is it possible to avoid performance losses without adding more cards? EVGA’s answer is "yes". We in our turn will try to answer the question if there is an alternative for the owners of ATI Radeon HD solutions.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...oop-physx.html

[JackNSally]

I could see this being a great video+physics card for those who only have 1 PCI-E slot.

[lkiller123]

The thing is, PhysX isn't getting anywhere. And it's not that popular either.