| EVGA Geforce GTX275 CO-OP PhysX Edition |
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| Written by David Ramsey - Edited by Olin Coles | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 08 February 2010 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
EVGA GTX275 CO-OP PhysX Edition ReviewNVIDIA and ATI dominate the market for gaming-oriented video cards. But neither company sells video cards directly to the consumer; rather, they produce "reference designs" that are manufactured by a number of "partners". Most partners simply produce the reference design and slap an identifying sticker on the card's cooler; although some might replace the reference design cooler with a quieter or more powerful solution, with few exceptions there's little to distinguish one partner's version of a specific card from another partner's version of the same card. EVGA breaks out of this rut with their EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition, model 012-P3-1178-TR, which combines NVIDIA GTS250 and GTX275 GPUs on the same card, and Benchmark Reviews takes it around the block to see what it's got.
Dual-GPU graphics cards are nothing new: the long-defunct Voodoo prototyped two and four-GPU cards (that never made it to market), and ATI introduced the Rage Fury Maxx twin-GPU card in 1999 (but poor driver support doomed it). NVIDIA's first successful foray into the dual-GPU market came in 2006 with the 7900GX2, and since then both ATI and NVIDIA have produced a number of dual-GPU cards. But what makes the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition different is that it comprises two different GPUs: a GTX250 and a GTX275. Rather than working together in an SLI configuration, the duties of the GPUs are separate: the GTX 275 is used for rendering, while the GTS 250 is used for PhysX. About EVGA CorporationEVGA is the #1 NVIDIA authorized partner in channel sales throughout North America. Based on the philosophy of intelligent innovation, market knowledge, and the real time operation, EVGA continues to identify the need in the market place and providing the solution to that need. By offering product differentiation, 24/7 tech support, a 90 day Step-Up program, and other customer focused programs, EVGA is a clear leader in all categories: etail, retail, distribution, and system builders. With headquarters in Brea, CA, EVGA's global coverage includes EVGA GmbH in Munich, EVGA LATAM in Miami, and EVGA Hong Kong. EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP Features
012-P3-1178-TR Specifications
It's important to note the separate specifications for each processor on the card. The GPUs and their memory are completely independent of each other.
EVGA GTX275 CO-OP First LookThe EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition is a largish double-slot card. Its 10.5" length is standard for higher-end video cards and it will fit in most mid-tower cases.
Rather than the squirrel-cage fan used by most video cards in this xxx, EVGA opts instead for a larger, bladed fan in the center of the card. The GTS250 GPU is near the rear of the card and the GTX275 GPU is near the front of the card. The card's cooler exhausts air from both the front and rear of the card.
At the rear of the card we see the twin HDMI connectors. Unlike many other higher-end NVIDIA-based cards, the GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition does not include an S-VHS video connector. The small "dot" above the DVI connectors is a power LED that glows green when the card's power cables are connected. The exhaust vents next to the connectors service the GTS 250 side of the card. 
On the back of the card we see the 16 screws securing parts of the cooling system and shroud. The black panel at the front of the card covers additional memory chips for the GTX 275 GPU.
The card requires both 8-pin and 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, not surprising given the two GPUs and more than a gigabyte of memory. 
The card's accessory bundle includes a quick start pamphlet, DVI-to-VGA and DVI-to-HDMI connectors, a Molex-to-6-pin PCI-E power adapter cable, a two-6-pin-to-one-8-pin PCI-E power adapter cable, a generic installation manual, a driver CD, a case badge, and a SPDIF cable. Until March 22, 2010, EVGA offers buyers of this card a free download of the Cryostasis first-person shooter game. Neither the printed manual, on-disk manual, or quick start pamphlet discuss the proper configuration of the card to make the best use of its PhysX capabilities. In fact, aside from a "Dedicated GTS 250 GPU for PhysX!" callout on the box, it's not mentioned at all. Apparently the target audience for this card already knows this stuff.
Join me in the next section as I take a detailed look at the hardware on this card.
EVGA GTX275 CO-OP Detailed FeaturesThe EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition is the first dual GPU video card to use different GPUs: there's a GTX 275 and a GTS 250. You cannot connect a monitor to the GTS 250; in fact, you can't use the GTS 250 for rendering at all. Both of the DVI connectors on the rear of the card are connected to the GTX 275. The GTS 250 is only available for CUDA work. But what is CUDA? We'll get to that in a later section.
The back of the card provides an exhaust for the heat sink cooling the GTX 275. 
Removing the shroud covering the cooling mechanism reveals the twin heat sinks, one for the GTS 250 (towards the rear of the card) and one for the GTX 275 (towards the front of the card). The heat sinks are aluminum with two copper heat pipes each. They rest on thick aluminum base plates and are quite heavy. While these radiators look large, they're actually much smaller (individually) than you'd find on a single-GPU GTX 275 card.
Stripped of the radiators and plastic support plate, the EVGA 012-P3-1178-TR model finally reveals its twin GPUs: 
As mentioned above, the two NVIDIA GPUs are completely separate and do not directly interact, unlike most dual-GPU cards where SLI or Crossfire technology is used. The GTS 250 has 384 megabytes of dedicated GDDR3 memory:
...while the GTX 275 has 896 megabytes of dedicated GDDR3 memory:
EVGA advertises the 012-P3-1178-TR model has having 1280 megabytes of memory, but it's important to remember that this is not any sort of unified buffer; the memory for the two GPUs is completely separate. NVIDIA CUDA and PhysXCUDA stands for "Compute Unified Device Architecture"; the term refers to the combination of the hardware architecture on NVIDIA 8xxx-series and later GPUs and NVIDIA's C programming language libraries. CUDA is a tool for software developers to leverage the many parallel compute engines on an NVIDIA GPU for solving problems amenable to parallelization— that is, problems whose work can be broken up into many parts, where the outcome of each part is not directly dependent on the outcomes of other parts. Although it's implemented in the driver rather than CUDA, anti-aliasing is a good example of such a problem: the post-processing applied to the pixels at the bottom right corner of the screen isn't affected by the processing applied to the pixels at the upper left corner of the screen, so these calculations can be done simultaneously if compute resources are available. A number of higher-level software libraries have been built on top of CUDA, including OpenCL, DirectCompute, and functions for the Matlab fourth generation programming language. There's also the Bullet collision detection system (used in games to determine when objects hit each other, which prevents your character from walking through walls) and NVIDIA's "PhysX" physics engine. NVIDIA has been aggressively pushing CUDA in the scientific and even military markets; in fact, they sell a specific line of GPU-based cards optimized for CUDA work (rather than graphics rendering) under the "Tesla" label. Tesla products range from individual cards that can be installed in most PCs to preconfigured "Personal Supercomputers" and large-scale rack-mount Tesla computing clusters. They also provide software products like the "Tesla Bio Workbench" for DNA sequencing and other biological computing tasks.
We've seen physics effects in games for years, with such libraries as the Havok physics engine featuring in titles like Half Life 2 and Company of Heroes. But these early attemps at adding physics to gameplay were limited to relatively simple interactions such as knocking over piles of boxes, or allowing thrown objects to ricochet realistically (i.e. bouncing grenades around corners). NVIDIA's PhysX can handle interactions that are orders of magnitude more complex. "PhysX" is simply a library of physics-related functions built on top of the CUDA architecture. NVIDIA acquired PhysX when they bought Ageia in February of 2008. Ageia, founded in 2002, designed a specialized Physics Processing Unit, or PPU, analogous to a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), except that it was designed specifically for physics calculations. A number of companies such as BFG briefly offered "Ageia PhysX" cards with the Ageia PPU before NVIDIA acquired the rights to the technology. After NVIDIA's acquisition, the PhysX library was re-written to run on top of CUDA and the PPU product was discontinued. PhysX is supported on GeForce 8-series and later cards with a minimum of 32 processing cores and 256 megabytes of memory. According to NVIDIA, PhysX is "...is a powerful physics engine enabling real-time physics in leading edge PC games. PhysX software is widely adopted by over 150 games and is used by more than 10,000 developers. PhysX is optimized for hardware acceleration by massively parallel processors. GeForce GPUs with PhysX provide an exponential increase in physics processing power taking gaming physics to the next level. With NVIDIA PhysX technology, game worlds literally come to life: walls can be torn down, glass can be shattered, trees bend in the wind, and water flows with body and force. NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with PhysX deliver the computing horsepower necessary to enable true, advanced physics in the next generation of game titles making canned animation effects a thing of the past." Optimizing PhysX performancePhysX can run on the same GPU that's performing rendering, but the performance will be sub-optimal. This is because the GPU can't run PhysX and render your graphics at the same time: when PhysX calculations need to be performed, a "context switch" from rendering to CUDA must occur, and another context switch is required when switching back to rendering. Although these context switches occur very quickly (on the order of microseconds), they also must occur very frequently, and the context switching time extracts a noticeable performance penalty (one of the performance advantages of NVIDIA's forthcoming "Fermi" architecture is that context switching is much faster). Context switches take so much time that PhysX running on a relatively low-end GPU that's dedicated to the task will handily outperform PhysX running on a high-end GPU that's also performing rendering. The NVIDIA control panel "sees" the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition card as two separate cards. Although EVGA's documentation is mute on the matter, you should ensure that the PhysX processing is set to run on the GTS 250 GPU for best performance. As we'll see in the benchmarks, this can make a substantial difference.
In the follwing sections, Benchmark Reviews will test the performance of this unique new video card. VGA Testing MethodologyAs of October 2009 Benchmark Reviews has discontinued testing on the Windows XP (DirectX 9) Operating System, although it is recognized that 52% or more of the gaming world still use this O/S. DirectX 11 is native to the Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System, and will be the centerpiece of our test platform for the foreseeable future. In many tests, DirectX 10 is utilized on the Windows 7 platform. According to the Steam Hardware Survey published at the time of Windows 7 launch, the most popular gaming resolution is 1280x1024 (17-19" standard LCD monitors) closely followed by 1024x768 (15-17" standard LCD). Normally, our benchmark performance tests concentrate on the up-and-coming higher-demand resolutions: 1680x1050 (22-24" widescreen LCD) and 1920x1200 (24-28" widescreen LCD monitors). These resolutions are more likely to be used by high-end graphics solutions, such as those tested in this article. In each benchmark test there is one 'cache run' that is conducted, followed by five recorded test runs. Results are collected at each setting with the highest and lowest results discarded. The remaining three results are averaged, and displayed in the performance charts. Due to the unique nature of this card, we're using two test applications (Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2) to test the performance of the GTX 275 GPU, and two other applications (Batman: Arkham Asylum and the Darkest of Days demo) to evaluate the performance of the card when PhysX is used. Intel P55 Test System
Benchmark Applications
Video Card Test Products
Crysis Warhead BenchmarkCrysis Warhead is an expansion pack based on the original Crysis video game. Crysis Warhead is based in the future, where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. Crysis Warhead uses a refined version of the CryENGINE2 graphics engine. Like Crysis, Warhead uses the Microsoft Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) API for graphics rendering. Benchmark Reviews uses the HOC Crysis Warhead benchmark tool to test and measure graphic performance using the Airfield 1 demo scene. This short test places a high amount of stress on a graphics card because of detailed terrain and textures. Using the DirectX 10 test with Medium Quality settings, the Airfield 1 demo scene receives 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering to create maximum graphic load and separate the products according to their performance.
There are no surprises here. The GTX 275 GPU on the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition card runs at stock clock rates and has the stock amount of VRAM. The performance of this card slots perfectly between the GTX 260 and GTX 285 cards.
Far Cry 2 BenchmarkUbisoft has developed Far Cry 2 as a sequel to the original, but with a very different approach to game play and story line. Far Cry 2 features a vast world built on Ubisoft's new game engine called Dunia, meaning "world", "earth" or "living" in Farci. The setting in Far Cry 2 takes place on a fictional Central African landscape, set to a modern day timeline. The Dunia engine was built specifically for Far Cry 2, by Ubisoft Montreal development team. It delivers realistic semi-destructible environments, special effects such as dynamic fire propagation and storms, real-time night-and-day sun light and moon light cycles, dynamic music system, and non-scripted enemy A.I actions. The Dunia game engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10. Only 2 or 3 percent of the original CryEngine code is re-used, according to Michiel Verheijdt, Senior Product Manager for Ubisoft Netherlands. Additionally, the engine is less hardware-demanding than CryEngine 2, the engine used in Crysis. It should be noted that Crysis delivers greater character and object texture detail, as well as more destructible elements within the environment, such as trees breaking into many smaller pieces and buildings breaking down to their component panels (however, these destructible effects do not use PhysX). Far Cry 2 also supports the amBX technology from Philips. With the proper hardware, this adds effects like vibrations, ambient colored lights, and fans that generate wind effects. There is a benchmark tool in the PC version of Far Cry 2, which offers an excellent array of settings for performance testing. Benchmark Reviews used the maximum settings allowed for DirectX 10 tests, with the resolution set to 1920x1200. Performance settings were all set to 'Very High', Render Quality was set to 'Ultra High' overall quality, 8x anti-aliasing was applied, and HDR and Bloom were enabled.
Again, there are no real surprises here: the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition turns in performance that perfectly splits the difference between the GTX 260 and GTX 285. Keep in mind that in these benchmarks, the GTS 250 processor on the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition is sitting idle; in the next section we'll start testing this card the way it was meant to be used: in PhysX-enabled games.
Batman: Arkham Asylum BenchmarkIn the previous two benchmarks, I tested the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition card purely as a standard GTX 275-based card; the GTS 250 GPU was sitting unused. The next two tests are PhysX-heavy games that make better use of this extra computing resource. There are three ways to run PhysX on your system:
The first four bars on each chart all show rendering on the GTX 275 GPU in the EVGA CO-OP PhysX card, but PhysX is run on a different "computing resource" in each case: first on the CPU, then on the shared GTX 275, then on the dedicated GTS 250 GPU on the card, and last on a separate GTX 280 GPU. As a final test I included a high-end Sapphire Vapor-X 100281VX-2SR Radeon HD 5870 video card with PhysX running on the CPU. Batman: Arkham Asylum exposes players to a unique, dark and atmospheric adventure that takes them to the depths of Arkham Asylum -Gotham's psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. Developed by Rocksteady, the game is based on Epic Game's Unreal Engine 3, which was upgraded to handle PhysX in the late 2007 release of Unreal Tournament 3, back when PhysX was still the property of Ageia. NVIDIA is touting this game as a PhysX showcase, and it is: despite the Unreal Engine 3's age, Batman: Arkham Asylum looks great on-screen, with richly detailed textures and PhysX-enabled effects such as cloth that reacts to stray breezes (and your Batarangs), fog that swirls around characters as they walk though it, and papers that flap realistically in the slightest breeze. As we can see from the chart results, running PhysX on your CPU, even with a very powerful GPU like the HD5870 rendering, isn't a viable option, but the test results do serve to show how computationally intensive PhysX is.
While the stock-clocked Core i5 750 processor in the test computer is a good performer, it's simply not up to the task of running PhysX code (to be fair, no standard processor is). Things improve dramatically when we switch to the GTX 275 GPU on the EVGA card, with frame rates more than doubling. However, this leaves the GTS 250 with nothing to do, so for the third set of benchmarks, PhysX set to run on that GPU. This is the situation that best illustrates the strength of this card: when we offload PhysX from the GTX 275 to the GTS 250, allowing the former to concentrate on rendering, frame rates jump by more than 56% at both resolutions. This is a huge increase and makes it dramatically clear why you should consider a dedicated GPU for PhysX. Although not shown on this graph, minimum frame rates improved by a similar amount: when PhysX was running on the GTX 275, minimum frame rates dropped below 20 frames per second at 1920x1200, but were about 30 frames per second with PhysX running on the GTS 250. This makes a lot of difference in the playability of the game. One surprising finding is that setting PhysX to run on a separate GTX 280 card did not significantly improve frame rates. The GTS 250 doesn't appear to be constraining PhysX performance in this game. Darkest of Days BenchmarkDarkest of Days is a new first-person shooter developed by 8monkey Labs. It takes players through five classic battles in five different time periods: you'll find yourself in Pompeii, Antietam, World War I, World War II, and Little Big Horn. You'll fight with period-correct weaponry but will occasionally have the ability to bring futuristic weapons like laser-sighted pulse guns into play. 8monkey Labs developed the Marmoset game engine specifically for this game. Marmoset has features such as image-based lighting (where HDR photographs can be used to define light sources) and the ability to support hundreds of active characters on the screen during battle scenes. It's optimized for large outdoor environments, supports skeletal animation for characters, has a variety of post-processing effects (including motion blur, bloom, and SSAO), and of course includes support for PhysX. The engine's AI system can support simple behaviors for hundreds of characters at once and still provide higher-level AI for one-on-one encounters with the player. The Darkest of Days demo includes a built-in benchmark feature. Settings were 8x anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering, graphics details set to Very High, and PhysX effects set to High. SSAO was left off.
The Darkest of Days demo washes your screen in dust kicked up by galloping horses, smoke and debris from explosions, blazing fires, and leaves blown through the air...all of which are calculated with PhysX. The game is just a slide show with the CPU trying to shoulder the burden, and the Marmoset engine obviously puts much more of a strain on the GPU than the older Unreal Engine, but the advantage of a dedicated PhysX processor is just as evident: frame rates jump by 58% at 1680x1050 and 32% at 1920x1200 when moving PhysX from the GTX 275 to the GTS 250. As with Batman: Arkham Asylum, dedicating a GTX 280 to PhysX results in little improvement over the GTS 250, with a 5% frame rate increase at 1680x1050 and an 8% increase at 1920x1200. Testing with the Radeon 5870 performing rendering and the CPU performing PhysX resulted in the same 1.3 frame per second achieved with the GTX 275 rendering and CPU running PhysX. Again, rendering power just doesn't make a difference in these cases. GTX275 PhysX Edition TemperaturesBenchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you're an overclocker, or merely a hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there's no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking the NVIDIA GeForce Video Card, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a GeForce graphics card for better performance. Of course, not every video card has the head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test. But the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition's two GPUs normally handle separate loads, and only the GTX 275 GPU can be used for rendering. I used Furmark to load the GTX 275 GPU, and the NVIDIA GPU-optimized version of Stanford's Folding@Home client to simultaneously load the GTS 250 GPU.
Starting with an ambient temperature of 24°C, I used GPU-Z to measure a surprisingly high idle temperature of 45°C for the GTS 250, and a more reasonable 40°C for the GTX 275. The test system is an "open" chassis so internal case temperature was not a concern. After running FurMark 1.7.0 and Folding@Home for 15 minutes, the load temperature stabilized at 64°C for the GTS 250 and 79°C for the GTX 275. The design of the card's cooling system means that warm air from the GTX 275 is expelled into your case, and in high load situations, there's rather a lot of warm air! You should make sure your case is well-ventilated. VGA Power ConsumptionLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. A high-end graphics card under load will use more power than any other component in your computer, and frequently more power than everything else in your computer combined!
To measure isolated video card power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken without a video card installed in the test computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:
* Results are accurate to within +/- 5W.
At idle, the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition uses 55 watts of power. With the GTX 275 GPU under load in Furmark (and the GTS 250 idle), the power consumption rose to 247 watts. Stressing the GTS 250 with Folding@Home took the total power consumption with both GPUs working to 305 watts. EVGA recommends a minimum of a 680 watt power supply for systems with this card. PhysX Edition Final ThoughtsNVIDIA's had it rough for the last 18 months or so. Their introduction of the GTX 280 card last year was quickly eclipsed by ATI's Radeon 4800 series, which offered most of the performance of the GTX 280 at a much lower price. Within weeks early adopters who paid $600 for their new GTX 280 cards saw prices tumble by 20% or more. Still, NVIDIA managed to hang onto the performance crown, tweaking the G200 GPU to produce the GTX 285 and doubling them up to produce the monstrous GTX 295. But the recent introduction of ATI's 5800 series cards took even that victory from NVIDIA, offering superior performance at a lower price. Still, more than twice as many participants in the Steam Hardware Survey use NVIDIA graphics cards as use ATI graphics cards. If you're in the market for a video card in the $300-$400 price range, you have a choice to make: do you go with an ATI card, with better frame rates and DirectX 11 advantages such as tessellation, advanced SSAO, and better performance on multi-core CPUs, or do you go with NVIDIA, and get CUDA and PhysX? Arguably the ATI card's features will be realized in more games than will PhysX, but enthusiasts interested in this level of card will often make their decision on an emotional level: to the NVIDIA loyalist, nothing beats PhysX effects and high-performance folding, whereas the ATI fan can't understand why someone wouldn't want better frame rates and and the very latest DirectX features.
Until the Fermi-based GTX 470 and GTX 480 cards are released, hopefully sometime in March 2010, PhysX and CUDA remain NVIDIA's only real advantages over ATI. ATI's working on things like DirectCompute and OpenCL, but CUDA has an immense head start, strong developer support, and an increasing number of game titles whefre PhysX is used to improve the gameplay. I was initially disappointed in EVGA's design: surely, I thought, it would be better to include a more robust GPU like the 260 for PhysX work. But as the benchmarks showed, the GTS 250 is (for now at least) the sweet spot for PhysX processing, as even the much more powerful GTX 280 GPU provided only fractionally better performance. EVGA sells individual GTS 250 and GTX 275-based cards in both stock and overclocked versions. At the time of this writing, an EVGA GTS 250 video card with the same 738MHz core clock as the GPU on the test card sells for $149.99 at Newegg. An EVGA GTX 275 card with a 633MHZ clock sells for $269.99, so both cards together would total $419.98, considerably more than the $349.99 the GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition sells for. You save $70, gain an extra PCIE X16 slot, and only have to come up with two PCI-E power cables instead of three...really, it's a win all around, as long as you want or need PhysX. If you're willing to live without it, an extra $50 or so will buy you a Radeon 5870, which will provide substantially better frame rates and DirectX 11 support. The GTS 250 GPU on the card can be useful even if you're not playing a PhysX-enabled game: devotees of Folding@Home will appreciate its presence, and an increasing number of CUDA-enabled applications such as the Badaboom Media Converter can make good use of it as well. EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP ConclusionNormally, Benchmark Reviews rates performance against other, similar products. However, the unique design of this card makes it difficult to compare. It's priced between standard GTX 275 and GTX 285 cards, and is much cheaper than separate GTS 250 and GTX 275 cards, so on a bang-for-the-buck basis, it really has no competition...as long as this particular combination of GPUs fits your needs. If you're an NVIDIA fan, an extra $50 or so over the cost of this card buys a GTX 285, which will provide 15%-20% better frame rates at high resolutions in games where PhysX is not used (which, it must be admitted, are most games), but would not perform as well when PhysX was involved. The least expensive solution that would provide better overall performance would be separate GTX 285 and GTS 250 cards, which would still cost much more than this card. The GTX 275 GPU provides enough performance to play most modern games at high settings and resolutions, and there's always the option of adding one or two more standard GTX 275 cards for an SLI system if you need more performance down the road. You could even use one or more GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition cards in SLI, but note that CUDA processes like PhysX cannot be split across multiple GPUs as rendering can, so such a configuration would not improve PhysX performance. As NVIDIA's partners struggle to compete with the ATI juggernaut, it's nice to see this kind of "out of the box" thinking in video card design. Still, this card would have been a more compelling solution, and a better value, before the introduction of ATI's DirectX 11 cards, which offer substantial performance and feature benefits, as long as you're willing to live without PhysX. But this card's designed for and marketed to people for whom PhysX is a major consideration, and in that limited market, it's without peer. 
Like most components inside your computer, this card will be all but invisible; even a windowed case will show only the top edge. Still, I'm glad the garish "Joker" sticker that adorned the coolers of the early cards has given way to a more restrained design. The radiator fins visible through the front of the card's cooling shroud give it a businesslike, "technical" appearance. The build quality of the card is excellent, with little touches like a back plate covering the memory chips near the front of the card. The custom-designed cooling solution, with its weighty heat-pipe radiators, is especially nice. The only design improvement I could suggest would be to move the GTX 275 GPU to the rear of the card, so that its hot air is expelled from the case, with the lower-power GTS 250's exhaust towards the front. With a $70 savings for the combined 012-P3-1178-TR Co-Op model as compared to buying separate GTS 250 and GTX 275-based cards, the EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX Edition is a good value selling for $349.99 at NewEgg ($329 after rebate). It's hard to find real bargains in high-end video cards these days, with most manufacturer partners selling similar cards at similar prices, but this card certainly qualifies. This card's unique design and market positioning, along with its performance and price, earn it the Benchmark Reviews Seal of Approval. Pros:
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