Mushkin has decided to play it safe with their GeForce GTX 295. The card follows NVIDIA's reference design specifications to the letter. While it is easy to launch such a product, the problem is that everyone else has the same product, too. So what does the Mushkin card offer to offset it from the competition? The only thing I see is the really nice wooden box, but that alone doesn't really make much difference for most of the users. Other than that, Mushkin can certainly work on the pricing to be cheaper than similar offerings from other companies, but in my opinion a company should work on adding unique selling points to their product and not only play the price card. On the other hand, going with a reference design removes many unknowns for potential customers. They know exactly what they get and how it will perform.
Overall the GeForce GTX 295 is an extremely powerful card that can handle all of today's games very well. Even though the noise levels are not nearly close to what I could consider silent, this was to be expected with such a powerful dual GPU solution. With the launch of Windows 7 around the corner one potential drawback might be the missing support for DirectX 11, but I have my doubts that we will see any titles making good use of it soon. DX11 cards from ATI and NVIDIA that can compete with the GTX 295 are still a good bit away, so if that is your concern you can safely get a GTX 295 today and enjoy your games, while everyone else searches the Internet's gossip sites for any info on the new cards.