![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , September 08, 2008
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
XFX GeForce GTX 280 and 260 XXX Edition
The highest clocked GTX 280 and GTX 260 cards from XFX are evaluated. We’ll find out the highest playable gameplay settings in Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Age of Conan, and Race Driver: Grid. We highlight real-world gameplay differences between the XFX GTX 260 XXX and GTX 280 XXX Editions and find which is the best value.
Test Setup
We will be using a quad-core CPU based platform on an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (Overclocked to 3.6 GHz), and 4GB of OCZ 3P-1600EB4GK DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.
Comparison Setup
We are overclocking our CPU from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce CPU limitations.
For the XFX GeForce GTX 280 XXX and GeForce GTX 260 XXX, we are using the latest drivers at the time of testing: ForceWare beta version 177.92. For the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4870, we are using the WHQL certified Catalyst 8.8 driver package.
We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista x64 installed.
Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.