Richard Vanderhurst reviews the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked
GeForce GTX 260 Review
“Core 216″ refers back to the fact that this is the second issue of this chip, with 216 processing cores, compared to 192 in the first. Sadly , potency in 3D cards does not usually translate into speed, and if you spend a little bit more you will find a noticeably quicker graphics card powered by ATI.
We like that card in its price class, but it is actually not the most reasonable product out there, neither is it acceptable for those with smaller monitors. Its frame refresh rates on all but Crysis are playable, so it’s in no fashion incapable, but current relative speeds also supply a guide for which cards might perform well on more demanding titles down the line.
We are especially impressed by its efficiency at load, consuming a full fifty watts less than the GTX 280, which was only a little quicker on our performance charts.
If you are feeling aware of your power invoice and the environment, and do not mind sacrificing some frames per 2nd, this EVGA card may all of a sudden look more engaging. Likely, you would still wish to match this card with at least a 550- or 600-watt power supply, presuming you combine it with a quad-core or fast dual-core CPU. You will not find a budget Computer with such a high wattage PSU, but you could be in a position to sneak it into a lately bought Computer around $1,000 or so. You want to attach the audio to the motherboard audio chip or your Computer sound card to send audio over the HDMI port, however. And, naturally, this card supports Nvidia’s SLI multicard technology, as well as hardware-accelerated PhysX, CUDA-enabled software, and all the other supposed “visual computing” features Nvidia likes to gloat about.
Some parallel computing features, like the agnostic zooming features in Adobe’s Photoshop CS four, are helpful, but we haven’t begun to see any gaming or widespread software implementation to persuade us of GPU-based computing’s main line use. We believe it’s only a matter of time, but by that point you will likely have a completely new array of 3D cards to choose between.
