Today marks the launch of the new NVIDIA GTX 280 video cards. These cards are replacing the dual GPU 9800 GX2 as the king of the performance from NVIDIA. The new video card uses only one GPU and is NVIDIA’s first all new video card class in a while.

ASUS has announced details of its GTX 280 called the ENGTX280/HTDP/1G. The card ships with ASUS’ SmartDoctor utility to adjust the shader clock to provide more performance. The GTX 280 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory. Pricing for the card is $649.99.

The ASUS GTX 280 has a core clock of 602MHz, a shader clock of 1296 MHz and a memory clock of 2214 MHz. The GTX 280 will work in SLI mode as well as 3-way SLI mode. A single NVIDIA GTX 280 delivers more performance alone than a single 9800 GX2, the SLI and 3-way SLI performance will be awesome.

ASUS