We saw the impressive GTX 280 take the stage last month with power beyond what we imagined. But being the best card in the world has its limitations, such as the high pricing that NVIDIA has placed on it. ATI has been improving largely in the performance area as well as competitive pricing, which according to DailyTech recently, has given NVIDIA some pressure as people are starting to fix their attention on ATI’s 4800 series. As a counterattack, NVIDIA has slashed its prices on the GTX 200 cards, one of which is the subject of review this month – the GTX 260.
On the GTX 260, NVIDIA disabled 48 stream processors and 16 texture address and filtering units, giving you 192 stream processors and 64 texture address/filtering units in total. Also, if you look at the specs diagram, you might find it weird that the card contains an unconventional amount of memory, that being 896MB GDDR3. Furthermore it’s built on a 448-bit architecture. At an NDA briefing in Computex, one person asked the reason for the unusual number and the NVIDIA spokesperson just said that it was because of the logic behind it. Well, we aren’t really complaining. After all, that’s nearly 1GB of memory on a wider bit architecture.
The bundle that came with the GTX 260 is pretty much the same with the GTX 280 with got last month from Zotac. You’ll see some DVI-VGA adapters, a pair of Molex-PCIe power connectors, a DVI-HDMI adapter, and a free copy of Grid, which is one of the best looking car games around. The graphics are so good that it all looks nearly real.
Okay, on to the physique. The enclosure of the card is exactly the same as the GTX 280, so much of the design is basically identical. It’s dual-slot and has a slanted section for the fan to draw in air and direct it at the chips. Like the GTX 280, it heats up pretty quick. At idle, the card was at a temperature of 57°C while it rose to 70°C at maximum workload. But the good news is, the GTX 260 requires only two 6pin PCIe connectors, so you don’t have to upgrade your PSU if you already have them both. Since this is neither an AMP! or Zone edition card, there hasn’t been any tweaking on the card’s clockspeeds.
With some shaders and texturing units disabled, you can be sure that the performance won’t be as high as the GTX 280. In 3DMark Vantage, the card scored 8,567 on the Performance preset and 5,771 on the High preset. This is about 1,500 points lower than the GTX 280’s figures. However, don’t let the large difference fool you. This card is a mean powerhouse as well. At high quality on Crysis and World in Conflict, we experienced smooth gameplay throughout the whole test.
So we have here a card that performs great, and unlike the GTX 280, it’s priced quite reasonably. About nearly $300 difference, players would be more eager to get the GTX 260 than its bigger brother. However, NVIDIA has recently slashed the prices on the GTX 200 cards in retaliation to AMD’s competitive pricing on their ATI 4800 cards. So you can expect a price drop soon.
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