Intro

As our graphics card reviews have gone a little bit red lately, we finally have something from the green-team to compare to. In order to regain the king-of-the-hill status back from AMD, Nvidia has brought a couple of new competitors to the high-end market. The older GT200 core based 280GTX was beaten by the HD4870X2, so Nvidia had to cook up something new. Just like AMD, Nvidia decided to regain the thrown by combining two cores on the same card. This would've been a tremendous feat with the older GT200-core, as it was tremendously hot, meaning that the dual-chip card would resemble a BBQ more than a graphics card. The GT200b-core was the solution they needed. In addition to lowering manufacturing costs per chip, the chip chip would run at lower temperatures due to the smaller manufacturing technique. AMD already took the plunge into 55 nm technology with the RV770 last summer, and Nvidia followed them a bit later with the GT200b. The GT200b really is just a shrunk GT200 that has been tweaked a little bit.