EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295 Plus

As you can see, EVGA’s GeForce GTX 295 Plus is built entirely on NVIDIA’s reference board design for the GTX 295. No surprise there. For all of their high-end cards NVIDIA manufactures all the cards for their board partners. More technically, they actually farm out all board production to someone like Flextronics.

Because of this, regardless of the name on the front of the box, you’re physically getting the exact same hardware when you purchase a GeForce GTX 295 card. This is where other intangibles such as price, service/support, game bundle, and warranty come into play. As long time readers of FiringSquad know by now, EVGA scores exceptionally well in all of these regards, with the company offering lifetime warranty coverage on their graphics cards, 24/7 toll-free tech support for North America as well as excellent online support via their forums, and EVGA’s game bundles have been pretty slick in the past as well; with the company currently offering Call of Duty: World at War with select graphics cards (sadly the GeForce GTX 295 Plus isn’t one of them).

While the hardware itself is bone stock, the GTX 295 Plus isn’t clocked at stock speeds. As its Plus name implies, the card is overclocked from the factory for added performance. More specifically EVGA clocks the GTX 295 Plus graphics core at 594MHz, 18MHz higher than stock. While the stream processors operate at 1296MHz, an improvement of 54MHz over the stock GTX 295 specifications. Finally the board’s memory runs at 1026MHz (2052MHz effective), this figure is 26MHz higher than stock.


Okay, so it’s not exactly a blazing high OC, but it is better than nothing. And officially the EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus retails for the same $499.99 MSRP as the bone stock GTX 295 cards clocked at 576MHz. So EVGA’s essentially providing a free performance boost for Plus card owners, albeit a minor one. If you’re familiar with EVGA’s lineup of cards you no doubt know about their SSC and Superclocked SKUs, which are typically among the highest OC’ed cards in their price class.

Once they’ve had more time to actually validate and test the GTX 295 at higher speeds, we wouldn’t be surprised if EVGA released a higher-end GTX 295 Superclocked or SSC SKU, but we did ask and right now the company has no official plans to go beyond the Plus card.

For now this is the only GeForce GTX 295 SKU EVGA plans to offer for this GPU.

EVGA Precision

One neat utility EVGA’s been bundling with their graphics cards is named EVGA Precision. Precision provides an easy way for EVGA card owners to overclock their graphics card without having to resort to a third-party app.

Included inside the card packaging is the latest version of Precision. Here’s what it looks like:

Uh oh. Is that GeForce GTX 285 I see? While it won’t hit retail shelves for another week, it looks like EVGA’s already got Precision up and running with NVIDIA’s 55-nm GeForce GTX 285. The GTX 285 boasts slightly higher clocks than the GTX 280, but more importantly it features NVIDIA’s 55-nm GT200b GPU just like GTX 295 (the GTX 285 continues to utilize a 512-bit memory interface). We’ll have more on the GTX 285 this time next week.

In any case, Precision provides a nifty way for users to OC the GPU, stream processors, and memory speeds. Just like NVIDIA’s System Tools, Precision also includes a slider for manual fan control. You can see the current settings for all of these to the right of the sliders. There you can also see a “Link” button. When clicked, this allows you to set the clock speed of the stream processors independent of the graphics core speed.

One neat thing about Precision is it provides handy descriptions for what each setting does. Just hold your mouse over a setting for a few seconds and the description will pop up.


Precision also provides built-in hardware monitoring functionality. On the left of the app you can see aspects such as GPU1 and GPU2 temperature, and core/shader/memory clock speeds. You can setup Precision to monitor these aspects over time at whatever polling rate you’d like, and you can even have Precision monitor your current frame rate (similar to FRAPS). Those of you with LCD-equipped Logitech keyboards can have all of this data exported to your keyboard’s LCD screen while gaming.

If you’d like, you can even use Precision to setup custom profiles that are bound to hotkeys. Overall it’s a pretty handy utility, especially if you’re new to graphics card overclocking and reluctant to use one of the more involved overclocking apps like RivaTuner.

The only feature that seems to be missing when compared to NVIDIA’s own System Utility is the ability to independently clock the GPUs on the GTX 295 card independent of each other. With NVIDIA’s System Utility this is accomplished via a pull-down menu which you use to select which GPU you’d like to OC. Knowing EVGA they’re probably working on this though. We managed to OC the GPUs on our EVGA GeForce GTX 295 Plus board to speeds of 693MHz core/1164MHz memory/1512MHz shaders.

Bundle and accessories

EVGA ships the GeForce GTX 295 Plus with a fairly minimal bundle for their standards. Included inside the card’s packaging is one DVI adapter, two power adapters (including an 8-pin PCIe 2.0 power adapter), and SPDIF audio cable for passing digital audio over HDMI. Of course also included is the driver CD which includes EVGA Precision, a Quick Start guide and dedicated manual, and finally an EVGA case badge.

Of course on the back plate of the GeForce GTX 295 card itself you’ll find two DVI outputs and one HDMI out. The two DVIs can be used together while SLI is enabled, while you’ll need to disable SLI if you’d like to run dedicated displays off all three video connections.