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Published: November 1, 2008 | Source: XFX | Author: Rich Weatherstone

XFX GTX260 896MB ‘Black Edition’

Test Setup
 
A common mistake made when benchmarking graphics cards is that the rest of the PC system isn’t sufficient enough to test the GPU to its limits. This results in a bottleneck situation, where the system can only run at the speed of its slowest component. For this reason, the test configuration chosen below has been specially selected to give each of the graphics cards on test the headroom they require in order to produce the best results.
 
CPU
Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz @ 3.6 Ghz
 
Motherboard
Gigabyte EP45-Extreme
 
Memory
Cellshock DDR2 PC-2 6400 5-5-5-18 @ 800mhz
 
Graphics Card
XFX GTX260 ‘Black Edition’
 
CPU Cooling
Scythe Ninja

Power Supply
OCZ 780w ModXstream
 
Hard Disk
Hitachi 7K160 7200rpm 80Gb

Display
Dell 3007 WFP-HC 30″ LCD
 
Graphics Drivers
NVidia Forceware 180.43
 
Operating System
Windows Vista 64bit SP1
 
A selection of games and benchmark suites has also been chosen to test each of the cards with several game engines. Each of the cards will be run at both low and high resolutions with varying levels of texture filtering to represent the use of the card with both small and large screen sizes.
 
3DMark06
1280×1024 / 0xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / 4xAA / 0xAF

3DMark Vantage
1280×1024 / Performance Mode
1900×1200 / Extreme Mode

 
Quake4
1280×1024 / Ultra / 4xAA / 4xAF
1920×1200 / Ultra / 4xAA / 4xAF
 
Unreal Tournament III
1280×1024 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
 
Call of Duty 4
1280×1024 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
 
F.E.A.R
1280×1024 / Max / 4xAA / 4xAF
1920×1200 / Max / 4xAA / 0xAF
 
BIOSHOCK
1280×1024 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
 
Crysis
1280×1024 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
1920×1200 / DX10 / High / 0xAA / 0xAF
 
Worthy of note is that because this card is a hot release, the latest Nvidia beta drivers (180.43) were used. This will have some bearing on the results as the older GTX260/280 were using the current official drivers. This is unavoidable as we cannot stick to the same old drivers forever, and it would be unfair to cripple a new card with incompatible drivers.
 
 
Overclocking
 
With the XFX GTX260 Black Edition is already clocked at a very respectable 666/2300mhz (Core/Memory) we were interested to see if XFX had maxed out the graphics card or if there was a little overclocking headroom left. To overclock the card, we used the latest version of RivaTuner (2.11) to examine the possibilities. To test for stability, we used 3DMark06. Here are the results we obtained:
 
 
We managed to overclock the core to 765mhz, the shaders to 1585mhz and the memory to 1311mhz. Pretty impressive to say the least. This gave us just short of a 1000 point increase in 3DMark06, which is nothing to be sniffed at for 30 minutes work. So, it’s all good news so far – surely it has to come to an end soon? Let’s take a look at how it faired against a group of other popular cards around at the moment…