There’s been something of a trend in the computer component industry over the last few years with Intel and nVidia ruling the roost in terms of CPU and graphics card performance, respectively. Meanwhile AMD/ATI has gone through a bit of a rough patch but has recently come back strong with some competitively priced products that, while perhaps not the fastest, have proved to be worthwhile investments nonetheless.

The one exception to this rule, however, was the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card that actually proved to be at least equal and generally faster than nVidia’s then top-of-the-range card, the GTX 280. The obvious problem for ATI was that it had already needed to meld two graphics chips onto one board in order to get the performance needed to compete with the GTX 280′s single chip, which begged the question, “If nVidia put two GTX 280 chips on one card, wouldn’t that be faster?”. Well, today that’s precisely what we’re going to find out.
Officially launched yesterday at CES, the GTX 295 is nVidia’s latest top-end graphics card and, as that preamble will have suggested to you, it uses two GTX 280 chips working together in a single card (just like SLI but on one card) to theoretically hand the competition its own proverbials. In actual fact, the GTX 295 isn’t quite two fully-fledged GTX 280s in so much as the clock speeds of the two chips have been lowered to the same as that of the GTX 260. Basically, the two cores run at 576MHz with the shader clock set to 1,242MHz. Memory speed has also been reduced to 1,998MHz.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphics/review/2009/01/09/nVidia-GeForce-GTX-295/p1