Looking under the heatsink, it's interesting to see that Nvidia has opted to move back to a separate display output controller.

Both of these connections also support HDMI via a DVI-to-HDMI dongle and, because Nvidia has included a S/PDIF connector next to the two power sockets, audio can be carried across the HDMI connection as well. Moving around to the PCI bracket, there is a pair of dual-link DVI-I outputs, each with the required crypto-ROM keys to drive HD video streams at resolutions up to 2,560 x 1,600. In fact, when you do, your display will not initialise as the card can only draw a maximum of 75W through the PCI-Express interconnect – this is in order to maintain backwards compatibility with older PCIe 1.1 motherboards. Unfortunately, you can’t connect a pair of six-pin supplementary power adapters and expect the card to function correctly. It could pay handsomely to have a bit more patience.More GeForce GTX 280We briefly mentioned power draw on the previous page – Nvidia says that in the worst case, the GeForce GTX 280 reference card will draw around 236W of board power.Īs a result, the card is suitably equipped with both six and eight-pin power connectors both of these need to be connected for the card to work. In the mean time, you might want to hold off for another week or two, if you have an itchy trigger finger for that GeForce GTX 280 you've been coveting. We'll keep you posted if we find out anything more concrete.

Upon hearing the MSRP for the GTX 280 could drop to $499 from one prominent board partner, we called others and, while not all would confirm the actual number, some said that it 'may be a little higher, or potentially even a little lower' ( than $499), but that something was definitely in the works.

Unfortunately, we were unable to confirm a price for the GTX 260, but we suspect it will hover somewhere around the $299 - $339 price points to better compete with the Radeon HD 4870. The actual numbers quoted have varied, but today we heard some news directly from multiple NVIDIA board partners that pricing on the GeForce GTX 280 may actually be dropping to as low as $499-a significant drop from the $649 launch price.

Over the last couple of days, there have been some rumblings around the web that NVIDIA is planning to drop the price of their recently launched GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 cards in response to AMD's potent, and more affordable, Radeon HD 4800 series.

Dual nvidia geforce gtx 280