Nvidia’s New Year resolution must have been to reclaim the performance crown, because that is exactly what they did on January 8th when they officially launched the new GeForce GTX 295. Although these ultra expensive high-end graphics cards do not sell all that well, AMD and Nvidia seem to stake their reputations on them. Developing the most powerful graphics card known to man is a point of pride we guess.

Whatever the case may be, up until January 2009 it was AMD who retained the boasting rights, with their dual GPU incarnation of the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 was released during August of 2008 and for a short 4 month period it was the hottest thing going around, and was responsible for driving down the price of the GeForce GTX 280.

Things were looking good for the consumer, with the GeForce GTX 280 heavily discounted due to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 selling for just $450 US, and although we say “just $450 US”, this is actually quite cheap for the latest and greatest gaming graphics card. Still, in a time of financial crisis, a $450 US graphics card just will not suffice, so of course Nvidia introduced the GeForce GTX 295 starting at $500 US.

However while Nvidia are quite happy to take your $500 US, they understand that this is not an option for everyone, and therefore have also come up with the GeForce GTX 285. This new graphics card is not based on a dual-GPU design. Rather it is a replacement for the original GeForce GTX 280, offering a few performance enhancements, and at $350 US it is an attractive option. Nevertheless, today we will be checking out the cream of the crop, as we take a look at the ASUS Extreme NGTX295.