I dont want to spend much time wasting portraying the specs again. This review deals with my personal experience with this card and Highlighting important specs and Differences from GTX 280.
To start with i dont own this card personally but got my hands on it for a couple of days (My friend was out of station, he owns this and i played in his computer for 5 days full).
Notable Technical Info and Difference
Its the small brother of GTX 280 but its definitely not smaller in size but in raw overall performance this card is 20-25% short when compared with GTX 280.
Main
Specs:
1.4 billion transistors 993 GigaFLOP processing power
Note the Highlighted points above. That will really upset those who spends 399 USD(priced 399$ when my friend boght) just to get the transistors count reduced when compared with lesser priced GTX 280.
My opinion
But PhysX performance is better than GTX 280, in game physics such as vector objects representation and their movements, lightning effects are very well represented.
In terms of appearance this card gives much a sort of a "Beasty" appearance than 9800 GTX. Its appearance is like its ready to take any game thrown to it, set at thier highest quality. But It really doesnt perform so and it explicitely shows that Appearances are deceiving.
Though this card performs good, its not better than its "Big Brother GTX 280 which is priced lesser than this one'''.
But this game is bundled with superb game. My friend got crysis along with this game. Crysis is the best game to take this card's performance to the core and is the best basline to measure this card's performance and capability and this card performs very good with Crysis.
Also this card performs better than its "Big Brother GTX 280" when overclocked. I experienced nearly 10-12 FPS increase even the game was getting a bit too overload for the card with vast environments and greater "Draw Distance".
But Overclocking must be done only by those persons who really knows that they are doing. If they "Roast" the card with higher clock rate, The card will really fire up. SO BE CAREFUL.
Also take at an in-game screenshot taken from GRID( Attached at the footer of this review ). It looks awesome at 1920x1200 resoulutioin with AA at 2x and Antistropic filtering at 4x respectively. But looks much better in 280 GTX.
For instance take a look at the road side direction signs. They just get blurred when their "Draw Distance" is more. Also look at the road details. The cracks are not that visible. But its not the case with GTX 280.
Also look at the link below. I drew this chart considering various card's performance without any overclocking and GTX 280 is a definite winner but GTX 260 is good.Game - STALKER.
Also my experience with this card watching Hi-Definition Movies (Blu-Ray Movies) is very pleasing and smooth. The in-built Hi-Def movie decoder does its job very well and movies play very smooth irrespective of the monitor resolution even when no SLI was used.
But 2/3 Way SLI is very good but this not really a "Big Advantage". Buying an other GTX 260 worth USD 350 ( current price ) and getting only 5-8 FPS increase in-game is quite annoying. This might be due to driver issues as drivers are still very new to this 3 way SLI technology and will be improved in days to come.
My Opinion
In my opinion one can better buy GTX 280 as it has overall performace better than this under stock frequencies and it has more transistors embedded in it and priced less than this too. '''So GTX 280 would be a better idea for those Hardcore Gamers''' to get the most out of the game.
But those people who does OC and use their system to crunch and squeeze the most out of their graphic cards, this is a good choice because this card can take it upto 300 MHz theoratically when Nitro Cooled.
This review is truly from my experience with this product and not copied from any site.
I dont recommend this to potential buyers because of GTX 280. :-)
'''P.S = I'm glad to have your comments. Please rate and comment this review if this review was useful for you, else please leave a feedback in my private guestbook to help me improve. Thanks in advance.'''
Regards
Nishanth Lakshminarayanan
Pictures of XFX GeForce GTX 260
I sport a Beasty look.
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