The GeForce GTX 260 is fitted with 896 MB of GDDR3 memory (on a 448-bit bus) and supports DirectX 10. The default clock rates are 576 MHz for the GPU, 1,242 MHz for the shaders, and 1,998 MHz for the memory. On our sample, MSI overclocked those frequencies to 620, 1,296 and 2,160 MHz, respectively. The best gain is seen in Mass Effect (UT3 Engine) at 1920x1200 pixels with anti-aliasing enabled—the overclocked values yield a frame rate increase of 14.2%. If you take the average of all the games included in the benchmark suite, the gain is 4.5%, which halves the gap between GeForce GTX 260 and a normally-clocked GTX 280.
In 3D performance, the GTX 260 puts up a tough fight against AMD’s Radeon HD 4870. At 1280x1024, the GTX 260 is actually better, while at 1680x1050 pixels (without anti-aliasing) the HD 4870 wins by 1.4%. With anti-aliasing enabled, the GTX 260 is 10% faster. At 1920x1200 without AA, the HD 4870 wins by a couple of frames per second, but with anti-aliasing turned on, the GTX 260 is 6% faster. Here the fast GDDR5 memory on the Radeon card starts to make itself felt. The considerable drop in price to $290, makes the GTX 260 a good alternative to the slightly weaker and now comparably-priced AMD Radeon HD 4870.
Unusually, the noise the GTX 260 generates while sitting on the Windows desktop is reasonable, in the neighborhood of 38.1 dB(A). After testing in 3D mode, the fan couldn’t make up its mind. The temperature dropped to 45 degrees C, but the speed didn’t change. The card was running without load, but we could still hear up to 44.2 dB(A). The speed re-adjustment only occurred in the test with the X38-based motherboard. It did not manifest itself on the 780i-based board.
The power consumption of the GTX 260 in 2D mode is considerably lower than either of AMD’s offerings. As soon as the GTX 260 comes out of 3D mode, it switches to its low-power 3D profile (GPU at 400 MHz, shaders at 800 MHz, and memory at 600 MHz), where it draws 125 watts of power for the entire system. After a few more seconds of idle, the clock rate is switched into 2D mode (GPU at 300 MHz, shaders at 600 MHz, and memory at 200 MHz). Overall consumption falls to 111 watts. Under 3D full load, the GeForce GTX 260 consumes 336 watts. A solid power supply with 280 to 320 watts of overall power and 23 to 27 A on the 12 volt rail should be sufficient here.
- Taxing Modern CPUs With Powerful Graphics
- Comparing The GPUs And Test Setup
- Radeon HD 4850
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4850
- Radeon HD 4870 OC
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4870 OC
- GeForce GTX 260 OC
- SLI With GeForce GTX 260 OC
- GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- SLI With GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- Assassin’s Creed v1.02
- Call of Duty 4 v1.6
- Crysis v1.21 High Quality
- Crysis v1.21 Very High Quality
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.4
- Half Life 2: Episode 2
- Mass Effect
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
- World in Conflict v1.05
- 3DMark06 1280x1024 v1.1.0
- How Overclocking Affected The MSI Cards
- Overall Performance
- Price/Performance Comparison
- How About Graphics Image Quality?
- Power Consumption, Noise, And Temperature
- Frames-Per-Watt For The GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series At 1280x1024
- GTX 200-Series and HD 4800-Series At 1680x1050
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series at 1920x1200
- All Cards Compared At 1280x1024
- All Cards Compared At 1680x1050
- All Cards Compared At 1920x1200
- Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- Swapping Old Chips For New
- Evaluation Of The New Generation
- Conclusions – Radeon HD 4850 Is The Winner











My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.
Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.
Remember, the more you know.
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?
Precisely; several other websites tested with 8.7 and 8.8 long before this article was published. Why couldn't you? Look at the 8.6 release notes; it doesn't even mention the HD4000 series cards as supported devices.
Brilliant guys.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values
After having the Mythbusters appear, you would think this would be the most comprehensive, "scientific," factual, and update article meeting Tom's usual standards.... I didn't finish reading this.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)
Also, I can understand why TH didn't have time to use 8.8 since it was released publicly on August 20, 2008 (Although ATI would have gladly released a beta version to TH for testing purposes).
However, AMD publicly released stable Catalyst 8.7(internal version 8.512) on July 21, 2008. That's more than a month ago. It has numerous improvements (for example, CF performance increase, improved stability and performance under Vista). To be honest, most of the improvements range from 4% to 15%. (In CF case, up to 1.7 X scaling)
TH has rarely been unfair and/or inaccurate and they always owned up to their mistakes before, and I trust them to re-test ATI products with at least 8.7 if not 8.8 to continue to uphold their values and integrity.
Now on to my criticism.
I can understand how you want to keep the results homogeneous with previous results but if you already know that a stock QX6800 will bottleneck the system, be proactive in fixing it. At the very least you should have done a small segment of the review showing the newer cards with a quad core overclocked to 4.0Ghz.
Also, if you have ever read any of the older Toms articles, you would know that you can still minimise the bottleneck from a slow GPU bye raising the resolution. Perhaps you should test the fastest cards at the highest resolutions?
I can also understand why you did not use the latest nVidia drivers. It takes time to create a review of this scale and the GF8/9 series drivers have been stable for some time. As the GT 200 series brings no new features to the table, they would needed little optimisation for their newer cards allowing the slightly dated drivers to perform nicely.
What I can not understand is why you would use ATI's 8.6 drivers??
The 8.7 drivers have been out for more than a month bringing quite a few fixes/optimisations with it. I understand it probably took more than 9 days to complete all of these benchmarks (today is the 29th, the 8.8 drivers were officially released on the 20th) but you should have called ATI and asked for their latest drivers. The 8.8 drivers were leaked at least a week before the official release which means, if you could nurture a relationship with the people you review, they could/probably would have provided them to you. There is still no excuse I can see for testing with the old 8.6 drivers. Seriously, it does not even have official support for the 48X0 cards...
From the title of the article,"The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head", I would have assumed that you would have been testing the Fastest 3D cards? What happened to your 4870x2? As you have already attempted to review it, we know you have your hands on one. How can you claim to review the "Fastest 3D Cards" and still leave out the fastest card?
In summation, I liked many things from this article. The layout was nice and a little more technical than we have been seeing as of late. I enjoyed the comparison charts at the end and I think you should adopt a similar method for the CPU and GPU charts. I would have thought this was an excellent and well thought out article if it had not been for the glaring and obvious deficiencies in reason. I give you credit for stepping Toms in the right direction. With a little more unbiased comparison, critical thinking and common sense I could come to see reviews such as this in a very positive light.