GTX 260 216 Shaders Edition Reviews

[Heinz68]

Here some great GTX 260 (216SP) reviews. All are OC and Superclocked Edition, the price is right and it looks like it's a winner even compared to GTX 280 at least value vice.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Z..._Amp2_Edition/
ThePowerUp review claims the OC GTX 260 is only 1% behind the regular GTX 280 in performance. Probably better comparison would be if both cards are OC. Anyway for somebody who likes to save money it looks like it's great deal.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforc...-ocx-maxcore/1
The Guru of 3D verdict

You know, how tiny this update might even be, I kind of like this updated little GTX 260. Where it was a 400 USD high-end graphics card two months ago, it now got a little more bite and a far lower price.

* The product at reference specification is pretty much dead on with a Radeon HD 4870, at a slightly lower price = a win.
* The BFG version is massively overclocked, performance is actually close and/or similar to the GeForce GTX 280 = a win.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...on-review.html
Part of the HardwareCanucks conclusion

What a rollercoaster ride this review was. Without a doubt, there will be parallels drawn between the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors and the venerable HD 4870 but before we get to that, let’s sit down and take a look at this card EVGA sent us. The EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition is one hell of a performer in every single game and just like the HD 4870 before it, redefines what people thought they would have to pay for this type performance. It used to be ATI reacting to Nvidia releases but now it seems that Nvidia is doing everything they can to answer the challenge brought upon it from the HD 4850 and HD 4870. In the end, it is the consumer that benefits no matter how much ATI or Nvidia fans howl at the moon that their preferred card is faster.

http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/...-Zotac/?page=1HotHardware Performance Summary:

The new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 performed very well throughout out entire battery of benchmarks. Overall, the GTX 260 Core 216 outperformed the first-gen GeForce GTX 260 in every test--as expected--and outpaced the Radeon HD 4870 in the vast majority of tests as well. The Zotac card we tested was marginally faster than EVGA's offering due to its slightly higher clock speeds, but the differences were small and could be made up for with some mild overclocking. In the multi-GPU tests, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 setup performed better than the Radeon HD 4870 CorssFire setup more often than not, but superior scaling in a couple of tests (3DMark06, HL2 1920x1200) gave the Radeons an edge.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3408&p=10
Here is AnanTech part of Final Words in the review.

Final Words
We tested seven games. AMD and NVIDIA split it, each winning three of them and virtually tied in the seventh. I hate to disappoint those looking for a one sided fight here, but this one is a wash. NVIDIA would want to point out that CUDA and PhysX are significant advantages that would put the Core 216 over the top but honestly there's no compelling application for either (much like the arguments for Havok and DirectX 10.1 from the AMD camp).

Our recommendation here is to first see if either card happens to run a game you care about better than the other, but if not then just buy whatever is cheaper. Today that would be the Radeon HD 4870, currently it's very tough to find stock-clocked Core 216s and those are priced above $300; even if we could find availability at $279, the 4870 is still cheaper. Until the price comes down, the Radeon HD 4870 still remains our pick at the $250 - $300 pricepoint. While NVIDIA has closed the performance gap, the part they used still maintains a price gap.

NVIDIA says they will have availability on the silicon but that only two manufacturers are going to have parts out of the gate on this, which does give us pause. If the GTX 260 had been originally released with 9 TPCs (216 SPs), then it would have been a better competitor to the Radeon HD 4870 and we wouldn't need this slight tweak of a readjusted part. It doesn't generally deliver near it's 12.5% maximum theoretical performance improvement, and really seems like its only a thinly attempt to win at a couple more benchmarks than usual.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...6_ALUs/?page=1
PCGamesHardware conclusion

AMD's HD 4870 isn't just a little bit cheaper than Nvidia's Geforce GTX 260, but often it is faster, too. Our test reveals, if Nvidia is able to close the gap with the pimped GTX 260.

Reissuing graphics cards under the same name but with different specifications is quite common in the graphics market. Thus it is no surprise that Nvidia chose to attack AMD's Radeon HD 4870 with a GTX 260 that has a higher number of calculating units.

The GT200 GPU has access to ten Thread Processor Clusters (TPC) - each one with 24 ALUs and eight TMUs respectively TAUs. While the Geforce GTX 280 can access the full number, Nvidia reduced the number to eight for the GTX 260. In order to close the gap to the Radeon HD 4870, the new GTX 260 will be delivered with nine TPCs. Therefore the overhauled GTX 260 has 216 ALUs and 72 texture units. This equals a theoretical performance benefit of 12.5 percent.
The memory interface is still assembled with seven ROP partitions with 64 Bit each, therefore the card still has 896 MiByte VRAM.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...50aHVzaWFzdA==
Part of Hardocp Bottom line

Price and performance ultimately define the value of any video card. The BFGTech GeForce GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE has upped the ante on both actual gaming performance and frame rate compared to the 4870. It is unquestionable that the BFGTech GeForce GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE can offer you a better gaming experience than the 4870, and no doubt higher benchmark scores. When comparing the old 260 to the new 260, the lines get a bit more blurred as actual gaming experience gains are marginal at best, but no doubt that benchmark monkeys will be happy. And scaling our GPU frequency to 705MHz was a nice stock overclock as well.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15464
Part of Hexus Final thoughts

Priced at around £199 for a default-clocked model and rising to around £230 for a pre-overclocked card like the BFG, performance is decent enough, we suppose, but such is the attractive pricing for a bone-stock GeForce GTX 280, at around £250, that we'd consider it instead of this BFG.

There's more to buying a graphics card than for just raw power, though, and NVIDIA continued efforts into Cuda and PhysX are beginning to become reasonably compelling reasons to look at the green team's products over ATI's.

Got around £199 to spend on a graphics card that can do more than paint pretty-looking pixels? The 'new' GeForce GTX 260 isn't a bad bet.

[G-Man]

EPIC FAILURE!

[Bman212121]

So it looks like they took a GTX 280 and just turned off 1 little part... As long as it's cheaper I guess that works... now I wonder if someone will figure out how to turn that part back on and just make a GTX 280 out of it. As for the naming convention, why the hell won't they just call it is GTX 265 or 270 so everyone can tell the difference?

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by G-Man

EPIC FAILURE!

Curse them for bringing out new cards with more performance! Why oh why would they want to give users more choices at different price points!?


FX5800= Epic failure
2900XT= Epic failure
S3 Savage = Epic failure
3dfx Banshee = Epic failure


You need to look up what the words you are writing mean- this card can't be deemed an "epic failure" in any sense of the words.

[CaptNKILL]

Originally Posted by Bman212121

So it looks like they took a GTX 280 and just turned off 1 little part... As long as it's cheaper I guess that works... now I wonder if someone will figure out how to turn that part back on and just make a GTX 280 out of it. As for the naming convention, why the hell won't they just call it is GTX 265 or 270 so everyone can tell the difference?

They just enabled more shader processors and a few texture units. The GTX 280 still has more ROPs, fillrate, bandwidth... the stuff no one seems to talk about any more even though it obviously effected these benchmarks.

Still, this looks like a decent card if it isn't much more expensive than the current 260.

EDIT: The standard EVGA model is on newegg for $299 right now...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130398

[FastRedPonyCar]

hmmm... buy one of these now and SLI a 2nd one later on or just wait for 4870X2 prices to drop at the end of the year.....

I could buy two core 216's for the cost of ONE 4870X2.

[Blacklash]

Two PNY GTX 260s can be had for 420usd with rebate @ Newegg currently.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by FastRedPonyCar

hmmm... buy one of these now and SLI a 2nd one later on or just wait for 4870X2 prices to drop at the end of the year.....

I could buy two core 216's for the cost of ONE 4870X2.

Your end result would be the same level of performance in games that scale though.

The advantages of the 4870X2 would be motherboard flexibility, DX10.1, and tesselator. (last two unused)

Advantage of the GTXs would be SLi flexibility, card disposal flexibility (could keep one), PhysX, and stereoscopic.

[Vanzagar]

Looks like a better deal than the GTX280, performance looks real close, like within 5%, yet is $150 cheaper...

But damn nVidia, whoever makes up your naming convention should be dragged outside and shot...

[Amaury]

yep looking to setup a tri sli rig with these cards when they are priced between $200-$250 which includes the mail in rebates. A $600 tri SLI GTX260 setup would be awesome!!!!!

[Vanzagar]

Does this mean nVidia will be releasing an enhanced gtx280 version soon? Seems like the competition now is too close... seems like the next logical step...

THoughts?

V

[Slappi]

Originally Posted by G-Man

EPIC FAILURE!

Don't worry, I'm sure your mom doesn't think that of you.