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gadget — Episode 098 – The EVGA GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition
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The GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked Edition is EVGA’s brand-spanking new, upper-midrange graphics card that is priced to compete directly against the ATI HD 4870. It sports a NVIDIA GTX 260 Graphics Processing Unit with 216 cores, or stream units, up from the 192 stream units in the standard GTX 260. The GPU runs at 626 Mhz, factory overclocked from the default 576 Mhz clock rate, and sits on a 400Mhz RAMDAC. The GTX 260 backs up the GPU with 896 MB of DDR3 graphics memory clocked at 2.1 GHz with an effective bandwidth of 117.92 GBps. Rounding out the package is a NVIDIA “PhysX” physics engine, and a PCI-E 2.0 interface.
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The GTX260 has full support for DX10, meaning that it can support all the latest eye-candy in the most modern games, and incorporates 2nd Generation Unified Shader Architecture. It also has hardware support for the 2nd Generation Purevideo HD, which leverages the hardware of the GTX 260 to give you smoother video, sharper pictures and more accurate colors during media playback.
Out of the box, EVGA provides everything that you need to get your gaming system up and fragging in just a few minutes. EVGA includes two video adapters in the box. One is a standard DVI to VGA connector and the other is a DVI-HDMI adapter. The card itself is a work of art, completely enclosed within a solid case that both protects the components while acting as a heat sink and air ducting unit. It is a full sized PCI-E card, so make sure that your system can handle the length. The GTX 260 is a double-width design, which shouldn’t be a problem for most modern motherboard which are designed to be used with such cards. The front of the card has a large “squirrel cage” fan that is quiet at low speeds and can move a considerable amount of air through the card when turned up. The Top of the card has two auxiliary power connectors next to an audio plug that you can use to link the GTX260 to your sound system in order to give you audio warnings in case there are any problems with the card. The back of the GTX260 has two DVI-I ports below a 7-pin HDTV connector. With its 896 MB of memory, the GTX260 can support up to two 2560×1600 displays, and it fully supports rotating, and all the other standard desktop functions. Everything is stacked underneath a large vent for the cooling of the card. Installing the GTX260 is straightforward. We used our Gateway FX540XT as our test bed. We removed the two EVGA 8800GTX parts from the case and installed our single GTX260 Superclocked Edition. We locked it into the case, connected the supplementary power and powered it on. EVGA bundles the GTX260 with EVGA Precision, a powerful application that allows you to monitor the vitals of your GTX260 in real-time. It will also allow you to tweak various performance parameters of your card, including the Core, Shader and Memory clock, as well as the fan speed of the on-card cooler. Precision lets you test your settings to see if they will be stable and it also give you an easy way to reset your adjustments should they go wrong. |
One of the cooler functions of the Precision software is that it gives you the option of outputting vital GPU health information to your Logitech LCD keyboard — Hopefully they will expand the list of compatible device so that we can all get this little extra bit of uberGeekitude.
Performance is great. In 3DMark Vantage GTX 260 scored 11,482 — coming close to the mark of our DUAL 8800 GTX, and beating the similarly-priced, ATI Radeon 4870 by more than 20% — Even though the ATI system had a 133MHz CPU clock advantage our rig bested it by 643 points in the all-important Graphics score. — and that was before we started tweaking the settings.
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Though your mileage may vary, we were able to clock our review unit up to 700 Mhz, demolishing even the 3DMark of our overclocked SLI rig. We can’t want to see what three-way-SLI with the GTX 260 will look like. In real-world gaming there were no surprises. Bioshock ran perfectly averaging 60 Frames per second in the most challenging parts of the game. Crysis was able to run at 1024×786 with all the eye-candy and at 1900×1200 with more conservative options. World of Warcraft was smooth and beautiful with all the effects turned on and the detail maximized. In short, this card screams… we just wonder what it can do in 3-Way SLI mode. Also of note is the inclusion of NVIDIA’s “PhysX” – This bit of silicon allows the GTX260 to more closely simulate real-world physics. Translation: particle effects like water and fire, and destructible environments like never seen before. PhysX technology is supported in over 140 currently shipping game titles. We’ll see it even more in games like Cryostasis, Nurien, MKX, Backbreaker, Bionic Commando, Aliens and Borderlands. The GTX260 also supports NVIDIA’s “CUDA” Technology. CUDA is essentially a technology initiative that gives programmers a set of software “hooks” that allow them to develop applications that can use the normally dormant power of the GPU for non-gaming purposes. CUDA applications can be programed in “C”, meaning that most every professional programmer should be able to optimize their applications to use the power of an 8, 9, or 200 series NVIDIA GPU. EVGA provides a “PowerPack” of applications that lets you play with the various elements of CUDA. They include a folding application that shows how net computing projects like folding for cancer or the SETI initiative can benefit by harnessing the GPU’s power. They also include one of the most useful CUDA apps, Badaboom, a transcoding application that can take a media file in one format and convert it into another. In our tests, CUDA support provided far better transcoding performance than would be possible by using the CPU alone. This is important for people who practice converting DVDs and other media files into formats that can be played on their iPods, iPhones, XBOX 360s, PSPs, AppleTVs or other media device. |
One of the signs that EVGA is committed to their users is the EVGA StepUp program. Within 90 days of buying your new EVGA card they will allow you to trade in the full-paid-price of your EVGA product towards the purchase of a higher-end card. That means that you can purchase a more economical part in their lineup without worrying about getting stuck with a video card that just can’t hack it: simply register your card, select the part you want to replace it with, and StepUp.
Registering your GTX260 will also earn you a free copy of 3DMark Vantage, which is good because you’ll want to benchmark this card constantly as you play with the settings.
The EVGA GTX260 Core 216 is available online and at major retailers, with a starting price of $279.
