MSI N280GTX SUPER OC review

Page 4 - Technical Specifications of NVIDIA GT200 (Part 2)

The cars has two DVI connectors, that can be used with HDMI adapter. Since you got the option of connecting S/PDIF for sound, you also get audio through the HDMI connector. There is also 7 pin analog connector that automatically grants use of S-Video. For the HD fans, the card packs a lot, there is H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 acceleration, as well as image post processing, dynamic contrast improvements and more realistic blue and green tones. 280GTX has separate image output controller, very similar to the on in G80, yet improved.

The monstrous card core (GT200), has the insane amount of 1400 million transistors (the most complex graphical core in the graphic card industry so far) and is hidden below a cap just like the one of Intel's Core processors. The size of the core below it is about 500-600mm2, meaning NVIDIA could get just about 90-100 chips from 300mm silicon disk. And though we're unaware of the precise size it is certainly much bigger than G80 chip, which effectively suggests that less chips fit on the same disk, making it rather ineffective to produce.

In purely performance sense GT200 could reach pick performance of 933.12 gigaFLOP. It has 240 thread processors, working at 1296MHz. They are separated in 10 processing clusters, each cluster being broken down to 3 streaming multiprocessors. When a task is is received , separate module of the core assigns it to one of the multiprocessors through instruction unit. Each multiprocessor has 16KB of cache working at the same frequency as the thread processors. That way accessing the shared memory is avoided and operations are not slowed.

And since we are already knee deep in technical details, let's move on to the real card usefulness - gaming performance.