XFX Nvidia GTX 275 XXX Review

Posted on July 23, 2010

So here we've got an XFX Nvidia GTX 275 XXX. Quite a mouthful!
Basically, it's an overclocked Nvidia GTX 275, already an extremely capable card that slots in somewhere between the GTX 260 & the GTX 280 and is in direct competition with the ATi 4890, but this card has made even better by the lovely people at XFX.
On the box we've got all the usual slightly weird looking artwork, a sticker telling us we're entitled to a free license for 3DMark Vantage & Far Cry 2.
So opening up the box we're confronted by the card. It's pretty big at 26cm (10.5 inches) long, so you need to make sure it will fit in your case! Built on a black circuitboard and under a lime green & black plastic cover which means the card is double height, there isn't much to see apart from the fan on top.
On the bottom we can see all the lovely soldering, and in the corner there's the two SLI connnectors making this card good for Tri-SLI.
Round the side we've got the two PCI-E power sockets required to power this thing, and alongside them there's a connector for connecting your sound card in to let it output audio through the DVI if you want to use it with an HDMI adapter.
On the back there's the two HDCP compatible DVI outputs, which can also be used for connecting to TV (via an HDMI adapater) or an analog monitor (with a VGA adapter)
Along with the card, we've got the licence card for 3DMark Vantage, a DVD of Far Cry 2, a driver CD, two molex to PCI-E power adapter cables and a warranty card (which doubles as a rather good looking "Do Not Disturb" door hanger).
XFX have overclocked the card so it has a 670MHz vs. 633 core clock, 1476MHz vs 1404 shader clock & 2360MHz vs 2268 memory clock. Basically it means the card is around 5-10% faster than a standard GTX 275 card.
The XFX GTX 275 XXX gets a Performance GPU score of 11748 from 3DMark Vantage. This is higher than 2x 9800GTX+ in SLI (score of 11371) and an overclocked GTX280 (10979). So, as we can see, it is an extremely powerful card, and with few drawbacks.
We have found it to be extremely capable in games, letting us set most settings on high, whack the resolution to 1920x1200 and it's still effortlessly smooth.
With our test PC (Intel Core i7 920, 6GB 1600MHz DDR3 & Asus P6T Deluxe V2) we were able to get average FPS of 37.11 in Crysis (Visuals on high, resolution at 1280x1024) meaning even the most challenging of games can be played smoothly at a not unreasonable framerate. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is extremely smooth at 1920x1200 with everything on high, often yielding framrates over 50. Less graphics intensive games such as Need for Speed World & Trackmania Nations Forever can be played without any graphics worries whatsoever.
It also has support for CUDA, meaning you can utilise the cores of the GPU to help out the CPU on intensive tasks such as video encoding. It also has a hardware decoder for HD Video, meaning the video will never stutter or struggle along.
The GTX275 may not be the most powerful card out there, but lets you turn up the resolution & graphical niceties and still lets you play nice and smooth. Yes, you can spend more money and get a few more FPS in your favourite game, but is there much point? The GTX 275 gives you 90% of the power at 60% of the cost of the top cards.
The XFX overclocking treatment is well worth it in my opinion, it gives the GTX 275 an insignificant boost at a very reasonable price. If you try to overclock a standard card, you warranty is void, whereas this comes ready overclocked and is guaranteed as such. It's a good deal for very little more money than a standard card.