Closer Look at Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum

Package and Accessories

Inno3D Company has long been known for their inexpensive solutions and, frankly speaking, this past got reflected in the design of the GeForce GTX 295 Platinum packaging: the amount of golden and silver colors in the box design exceeds all possible and impossible limits, in our opinion. The picture is also quite common for the graphics market: it depicts another female warrior with a humongous sword:

However, the widely spread mistake with the wrong graphics memory type is right there: as you can see in the lower right corner of the box, the card has 1792 MB of DDR3 with 896-bit access onboard. Of course, in reality the card is equipped with two GDDR3 memory banks, each 896 MB big and connected to its graphics core via a 448-bit bus. The specifics of contemporary multi-GPU technologies implementation imply that contemporary 3D applications can only use half of the indicated memory capacity, i.e. 896 MB, and this is where GeForce GTX 295 yields to Radeon HD 4870 X2 that is equipped with two 1024 MB memory banks.

As for other information that may be helpful to the potential buyer, I should mention the stickers about Far Cry 2 and Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction games bundled with the card. I am sure everyone is familiar with the first one, while the second one is a free multi-player shooter based on Unreal Engine 3 that broadly utilizes PhysX acceleration feature of Nvidia GeForce processors.

The box is fairly small and can fit into any bag or plastic bag, so you won’t have problems carrying the newly bought card home. Beneath a bright cover there is a solid box made of thick brown cardboard that holds two more boxes. One large box protected with extra polyurethane foam padding holds the card sealed into a antistatic bag, while the other contains all bundled cables and adapters. The list of bundled accessories includes the following items:

• DVI-I → D-Sub adapter;
• DVI-I → HDMI adapter;
• 2x4-pin Molex → 1x6-pin PCIe adapter;
• S/PDIF cable;
• CD disk with drivers;
• DVD disk with far Cry 2 game;
• DVD disk with Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction game;
• 10% discount coupon for nZone.com online store.

We think that an adapter for 8-pin PCIe 2.0 could be a nice addition to this bundle, because not all contemporary power supply units are equipped with this connector so far. The absence of user manual could also be considered a drawback, although there is something like that on the inside of the sleeve for the CD disk with drivers. The disk contains not only the drivers and outdated instructions for them, but also a copy of the Badaboom media-converter that can take advantage of the Nvidia GPU computational capacities.

Overall, the accessories bundled with Inno3D GeForce GTX 295 Platinum made a twofaced impression. On the one hand, two high-quality games included with the product are a definite advantage, but on the other, it is frustrating to have an important adapter and user manual missing. The same is true for the packaging, which very well fulfills its protective functions but features pretty tacky design. We get the feeling that Inno3D was in a real hurry to release their GeForce GTX 295 and didn’t have enough time to think all the details carefully through.

Of course, package and accessories are important, especially for a high-end solution, but they do not determine its performance and ability to win or lose. So let’s now take a closer look at the card itself.