Date:
Friday , January 02, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
Google +1

XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition

If you thought it couldn’t get any better than XFX’s well known “XXX” edition of highly clocked video cards, then you haven’t met its “Black Edition” yet. XFX has a new line poised to take the performance crown sporting the latest GeForce GTX 260 specifications. Six games played and A2A as well.

continued...

System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

While it might be a bit “overkill,” we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

Article Image

Comparison Setup

All three video cards were evaluated at their default frequencies and with the latest drivers available at the time of the evaluation. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 (216 core) will be using ForceWare 180.48 WHQL. For the ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB we will be using the Catalyst 8.11 driver which was the latest at the time of testing. We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home .

Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.