Although it is but slightly faster than the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce 9800 GX2, the GeForce GTX 280 can be viewed as the fastest single graphics card in the price category of $499 because the GeForce 9800 GX2 doesn’t always deliver its maximum performance and doesn’t support multi-monitor configurations.

It is yet unclear at what official price the Radeon HD 4870 X2 will come out. It cannot be far cheaper than two Radeon HD 4870 cards. Most likely it will be in a higher price category, especially its version with GDDR5 memory. That’s why it would be interesting to compare the GeForce GTX 280 with a couple of Radeon HD 4850 cards working in a CrossFireX tandem. The GeForce GTX 280 will remain the best of single graphics cards for a while yet, even though it is not an undisputed overall winner as Nvidia had wanted it to be.

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