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ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 Video Card Review

Jason Landals
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NVIDIA’s release cycle for video cards has recently been a little more rushed then usual. The reason behind this is that the last three series have about been based on the same basic unified architecture. So how well do the newest GTX 280 series cards perform? Well the folks at ZOTAC sent us a card so we could find out for ourselves.

The GeForce GTX 280, and it’s little brother the GeForce GTX 260, were released in June of this year. This is just three months after the release of the GeForce 9 series. Now it may be based off the same unified architecture, but on paper, the new GTX 200 series of chips have a definite performance boost over the previously released chips. For starters this new GPU contains 1.4 billion transistors and is made on a 65nm fabrication process. According to some sources this makes the GTX 2xx series a chip with the largest die area ever fabricated for a GPU. The GTX 280 has 240 shaders (stream processors), and comes with 1GB of GDDR3 VRAM on a 512 bit bus. The chip is said to put out approximately 933 GFLOPS of floating point power.

As for the card we’re looking at, ZOTAC has done like most other manufacturers and stuck closely to NVIDIA’s reference design for the GeForce GTX 280. ZOTAC does offer higher clocked GTX 280 cards, but the one we’re looking at today is stock clocked. Here’s a quick rundown of the technologies included with this latest video card. Full specifications can be found on the product home page.

  • NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD Technology
  • NVIDIA CUDA technology
  • NVIDIA PhysX ready
  • HDTV Ready
  • Vista™ Ready
  • NVIDIA SLI™ Ready
  • HDCP Compliant
  • Full HD 1080p compatible
  • Dual Link Dual DVI
  • RoHS Compliant

Pricing for the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 comes in at rates very similar to most other stock clocked GeFore GTX 280 cards on the market. When looking at sites like NewEgg and NCIX, you’ll find that prices only vary +/- $10. So that basically leaves us with a basic GeForce GTX 280 card, and a whole host of benchmarks to find out how well it performs. First we need to see what’s in the package.

What’s in the Box?

With the GeForce GTX 280, ZOTAC has included a decent caché of accessories. For cables, they’ve included power adapters for the 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe connectors, a VGA-to-DVI convertor, and the standard cable for component and S-video outputs. Also included is a DVI-to-HDMI convertor, and an SPDIF cable so you can use the audio channel on the HDMI connection.

For software and paper-work, ZOTAC has the standard user manual, installation guide, and drivers disk. However they added one little surprise that was nice to see; the addition of a full version game. The game in question is Race Driver: GRID, which was just released June 3. This is a good choice for the retail package, as it gives folks the chance to test out their new video card in a brand new game built for it.

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The Card Itself

As I noted above, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 sticks closely to NVIDIA’s reference design. The rear of the card is similar to a 9800 GTX in that there’s two DVI ports side by side, a video out on the end, and the exhaust for the fan above. There’s also an LED next to the exhaust which indicates power, incase you were curious if your video card was actually on.

The SLI connectors reside directly behind the ports, on the leading edge of the video card. The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280, and all other GTX 280 cards, support triple SLI. This necessitates two SLI connectors, and a special SLI bridge that should be provided with a compatible motherboard. As a nice touch, ZOTAC placed a handy little rubber cover over the SLI ports to protect them from the elements.

The SPDIF port also gets the “rubber cover” treatment, should you not need to hook up the SPDIF cable. This port carries audio from your sound card or DVD driver through the HDMI cable to an HDTV.

Next to the SPDIF port is the power connectors. The GeForce GTX 280 uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCIe connector to draw power from the PSU. Though NVIDIA’s own specifications say the minimum power supply rating to run one of these cards is 550W, I’d recommend getting a 650W or better power supply. At load this card draws 236 Watts so if you are going to run two or three in SLI you will need an ever larger power supply, possibly in the kilowatt range.

Now incase you haven’t noticed yet, there’s one physical difference between this card and its predecessors. Where as many video cards have their backsides exposed, this entire card is encased in a metal shell. Though the shell is fairly easy to remove, I was unable to capture the event. Needless to say, the shell aids in cooling as there are memory chips on either side of the card.

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Heart of the Matter

There’s also the main GPU core, which by all accounts is rather large. This is due by and large to the heat spreader NVIDIA installed. Still I’m left wondering how large the core underneath is. Power regulation is taken care of by a complex system of transistors and solid state capacitors. Like the 9800 GTX we reviewed, the GeForce GTX 280 doesn’t chintz out by using electrolyte based capacitors. Now we just need to see how this card performs against our previously reviewed video cards.

Testing

Now the fun begins. We get to test and see how well the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 stacks up against the cards I’ve previously reviewed. Here’s the rig we threw together to test out this new behemoth of a video card.

For testing we first ran 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage. This gives us a base line to go from when flowing into the gaming tests. Due to some problems with our Supreme Commander test, the testing for the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 is going to be rather heavy with first person shooters. Normally we’d also test acoustics, and see how loud the card is. However that was a bust, as the readings I got from my sound meter weren’t any different then those of the tests performed with the same case containing a 9800 GTX. So…let’s see how well this card chews through polygons.

First up in our round of synthetic benchmarks is 3DMark06. Though this benchmark is starting to become antiquated, this tool is still useful in determining the DirectX 9 performance of a video card. Why would anyone want to do that? Well there are still quite a few DX9 titles enjoyed by gamers. Does the title Half Life 2 ring a bell to anyone? Anyhow, for the test we ran the default settings in every category except resolution, which was ramped to 1680×1050. The ZOTAC card only posts a performance gain of 4%, which is minor compared to the gain of 15% between the 9800 GTX and 9600 GT. I’m curious to see how this will translate into the benchmark results for our DX9 games.

When we turned to 3DMark Vantage to test DirectX 10 performance, we started to see the gap widen between the GeForce GTX 280 and the previous cards. In the “Performance” test, in which the resolution is set at 1280×1024 and everything is set to medium without any Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering, the GTX 280 posted a 29% performance gain.

The gap widened even more in the “High” test, where the GTX 280 performed 41% faster then the 9800 GTX. This would almost seem like quite a nice performance boost, until I throw one caveat into the mix. Although I did not have one on hand to take first hand benchmarks, It would appear that the 9800GX2 and the GTX 280 are on par when it comes to performance. Further research shows that the performance gains I have here, in a similar configuration, come quite close to those posted by the 9800 GX2. This is just something to chew on, as we complete the review.

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Real World Testing

Now that we’ve got the sythetic benchmarks out of the way, it’s time to see how well the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 holds up to some real world tests. We have two DX9 titles, a DX9 title that has DX10 abilities, and a pure-bred DX10 title to showcase here. Let’s get it done.

Half LIfe: Episode 2

First up in our collection of 3D shoot’em ups is Episode Two of Half Life 2. This is a replacement to our usual choice of Supreme Commander, due to some issues had with that test. For testing we used the HardwareOC benchmark tool, set to defaults, with the resolution ramped up to 1680×1050. I did a run through both included demos, and turned up some interesting results. This essentially mirrors what we saw in the 3DMark06 tests, as there is little to not difference in performance between each card. There’s even a minor performance drop on the GTX 280 in Demo #2.

With numbers like these being posted, one would tend to assume that playability didn’t suffer in the least. Such an assumption would be correct. Gameplay was extremely smooth. I went in and started ramping up the settings, and when using the GTX 280 I didn’t really see a significant performance drop. The 9800 GTX didn’t fare so well; dropping 25% or better when jacking up detail settings, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic Filtering.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Things started shaping up a little more when we turned to Call of Duty 4. The game is DX9 based, but has some DX10-like tricks when rendering scenes. Testing was performed doing a run through of one of the early levels and recording frame rates using Fraps. Resolution was set to 1680×1050, settings were ramped up to high, and 4x Antialiasing was employed. In the end, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 posted a decent 28% performance increase over the 9800 GTX.

Once again, playability wasn’t an issue. The ZOTAC card provided smooth firefights in the roughest of missions. Since I was playing the game myself, and not using a benchmarking tool, there wasn’t much more I could do with the settings. Still there wasn’t much I needed to do. ‘Nuff said.

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BIOSHOCK

Working our way down the row of more and more demanding games we come to the third benchmark title; a little game by the name of BioShock. This game started life with the ability to play on DX9 hardware, but was quickly updated to support DX10 fully. Testing here once again consisted of using Fraps to record frame rates. Our level of choice for testing was the final battle, which includes all sorts of beautiful effects. Settings were ramped up to the highest levels, and we set the resolution to 1680×1050. With all this done, the ZOTAC card posted a performance gain of 13% over the 9800 GTX. Though not immediately staggering, this is still a double-digit boost.

As for playability, the game pretty well never dropped below 40 FPS during the entire boss battle. Even with fire being flung my way, and some big glowing guy charging me at every opportunity, the game play was still smooth as silk.

Crysis

Finally we come the game title known as the Elephant in the room to many gamers. That title would be Crysis. It’s taken some time for the hardware to catch up to this title to the point where it’s playable. That has made it a hard game to ignore, as its open play style and incredible graphics make for an amazing experience. To test this experience, we used another tool from the folks over at HardwareOC. The HOC GPU demo was used for testing, and when running the benchmark settings we set to the “High” preset and resolution was set to 1680×1050. Once the dust settled, the ZOTAC card was 20% ahead of the 9800 GTX. This is great, as it also means that gameplay should be much smoother.

Well I can happily say that it was an overall smooth experience. Though I would prefer an average of 60 FPS to give enough headroom for complex scenes, 40 FPS isn’t anything to sneeze at in this highly demanding title. At this frame rate, I rarely experienced any slide shows, and was able to proceed through the game without incident.

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Final Thoughts and Conclusion

ZOTAC has produced a solid card with the GeForce GTX 280. I’m still divided on where I stand with the GPU powering it. The card does perform well in all our tests, but its price is a little steep. When you consider the 9800 GX2, things get a little more muddy. Really, we’re left running down the particulars.

The ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 is a decent package. The numbers posted in our tests are definitely faster than any card I’ve tested thus far. Add to that the fact that it makes Crysis playable, and this card does become more desirable for many gamers. The retail package is well equipped, and the addition of a current, full version game for free is an awesome touch.

Unfortunately, ZOTAC can’t avoid the potential shortcomings of the chipset powering this video card. It isn’t their fault; that lies squarely on the shoulders of NVIDIA. From many accounts, the 9800 GX2 and GTX 280 come quite close to each other in performance. That becomes a concern when you look at the price tag; the GTX 280 is more expensive then the 9800 GX2. How much more depends on where you go. Also, this is a base model GTX 280 and the addition of the game is the only thing that differentiates it from other base model GTX 280 packages.

Luckily the pricing issue has worked itself out in the market place. As I was writing this article, NVIDIA announced price drops for the GeForce GTX 280. Though this was more a response to ATI and the pricing models for their latest cards, it had the nice side effect of bringing the GTX 280 down to the same price range as the 9800 GX2. The added benefit is that the GTX 280 only has a single physical GPU, which generates less heat and is easier to setup in SLI.

So where does that leave us? Well ZOTAC has put together a great basic package for the GTX 280. The card may not be overclocked, or come with some elaborate gold and velour heatsink, but it does what it’s supposed to do. With the addition of a game that many are singing the praises of is only icing on the cake. If I were in the market for a GeForce GTX 280 card, I would have little hesitation in going with this package.

The Good

  • Complete retail package
  • Brand new full game included
  • Included HDMI-to-DVI convertor
  • Performance is more than decent, makes Crysis playable

The Bad

  • Performance similar to previous 9800 GX2 card
  • Need to shop around to find reduced pricing

Overall Rating: 9.0/10.0

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