Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 Super Overclock

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Earlier this year, I posted a review of Sapphire's Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X graphics card, and at the time, I felt weird for doing it. The reason was simple. At that point in time, the HD 4870 wasn't a new card. In fact, the HD 4890 was released just a month prior. So what was the point? At the time, ATI's pricing structure was varied and Sapphire's card featured 2GB of GDDR5, so, despite being based on a ten-month-old design, it was still relevant. I had a bit of deja vu when Gigabyte contacted me a few weeks ago to take their latest GeForce GTX 260 for a spin. I immediately thought, "What the...", because let's face it, the GTX 260 is not a new card. The first iteration of the card came to market last June, while the revision, featuring 216 Shader cores, came in early October. So as it stands, the card we're looking at today is essentially based on a model which was launched almost exactly a year ago. So how is a review of this year-old card justified today? Like the aforementioned Sapphire review, the biggest part of the card's relevancy again comes down to pricing. This particular model sells for $199, which puts it between all other GTX 260 cards and the GTX 275. Gigabyte justifies the price hike by offering the highest-clocked GTX 260 on the market, with 680MHz Core, 1500MHz Shader and 2500MHz memory clock speeds. With clocks such as these, the card looks to overtake, or at least match, the performance of the more-expensive GTX 275. Closer Look at Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 260 Super Overclock. Welcome to Gigabyte's "Super Overclock" series. As the name suggests, cards belonging to this series will be shipped with higher clock speeds than what NVIDIA sets as reference. In the case of the reference GTX 260, the clocks are 576MHz Core, 1242MHz Shader and 1998MHz Memory. As you can tell by the specs mentioned above, Gigabyte has increased the clocks enough to have it become real competition to the next model up in NVIDIA's line-up, the GTX 275, despite that card featuring more overall Shader cores (240 vs. 216). In addition to featuring higher-than-reference clock speeds, Super Overclock cards go through extra care before earning their name. In what the company calls the "GPU Gauntlet" - essentially a cherry-picking process - Super Overclock cards are put through stringent testing to assure that they are the best available, not only from a performance perspective, but also to verify top-rate thermal efficiency and power switching capabilities. As Gigabyte's highest-end graphics series, these cards in turn include the company's "Ultra Durable VGA" set of high-grade components. These include careful choosing of Samsung or Hynix memory chips, Japanese solid capacitors, Ferrite core metal chokes, low RDS(ON) MOSFETs, and not surprisingly, a PCB built using 2oz of copper for its inner layer. All of this might not mean much to most people, but it all comes down to a high-quality product - one that's stable, runs cool and is very, very overclockable. Currently, NVIDIA's graphics card line-up is rather slim, with six real choices overall. The last generation 9800 GT is at or under $100, putting it in a different category from the others. The GTS 250 card starts off at around $125, and we move up to the GTX 285, which sells for just over $300. At this point in time, we wouldn't recommend considering a GTX 295 for purchase, as AMD's Radeon HD 5870 X2 is right around the corner and will likely have a similar cost. Even if that's not the case, given the sheer improvement that current HD 5000 cards show over previous generations, it should theoretically be twice as fast as the GTX 295. Model Core MHz Shader MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors GeForce GTX 295 576 1242 1000 1792MB 448-bit 480 GeForce GTX 285 648 1476 1242 1GB 512-bit 240 GeForce GTX 275 633 1404 1134 896MB 448-bit 240 GeForce GTX 260 576 1242 999 896MB 448-bit 216 GeForce GTS 250 738 1836 1100 1GB 256-bit 128 GeForce 9800 GT 600 1500 900 512MB 256-bit 112 Enough about the other cards though, and more about the one in our test bench today. As you can see below, although Gigabyte has bumped each one of the clocks on the card far beyond reference speeds, it's opted to stick with the reference cooler. Although this cooler design is more than capable of keeping cards cool and allow for good overclocking-ability, it would have been nice to see a custom design given this is a special series. At the back, we have the option to use DVI, HDMI or VGA. If you want to use more than one monitor but neither uses an HDMI port, Gigabyte includes an HDMI-to-DVI adapter in the box that should remedy the problem. Just like the rest of the current mid-range cards from both ATI and NVIDIA, the GTX 260 sticks to a 2x PCI-E 6-pin power setup. As the card carries a TDP of 182W, NVIDIA recommends a power supply with of at least 500W, although for a card pre-overclocked such as this, its recommendation would likely increase to 550W. Throughout our testing results, one thing we want to pay attention to is how this card compares to the slightly more expensive (~$25) GTX 275. Our GTX 260 here has 24 less Shaders, but our ultra-high clocks may negate the loss of those. On the following page, we'll go over our testing methodology and machine specs, and then we'll get right into our results, kicking things off with Call of Duty: World at War. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. For an exhaustive look at our methodologies, even down to the Windows Vista installation, please refer to this article. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core, 3.33GHz, 1.33v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - X58-based, F7 BIOS (05/11/09) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60v ATI Graphics Radeon HD 4890 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.8 Radeon HD 4870 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 9.8 Radeon HD 4770 512MB (Gigabyte) - Catalyst 9.8 NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 295 1792MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 285 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 275 896MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (Gigabyte Super OC) - GeForce 190.62 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (XFX) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTS 250 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Services Disabled Prior to Benchmarking PerfectDisk 10. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. For more robust information on how we tweak Windows, please refer once again to this article. Game Titles. At this time, we currently benchmark all of our games using three popular resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1080 and also 2560x1600. 1680x1050 was chosen as it's one of the most popular resolutions for gamers sporting ~20" displays. 1920x1080 might stand out, since we've always used 1920x1200 in the past, but we didn't make this change without some serious thought. After taking a look at the current landscape for desktop monitors around ~24", we noticed that 1920x1200 is definitely on the way out, as more and more models are coming out as native 1080p. It's for this reason that we chose it. Finally, for high-end gamers, we also benchmark using 2560x1600, a resolution that's just about 2x 1080p. For graphics cards that include less than 1GB of GDDR, we omit Grand Theft Auto IV from our testing, as our chosen detail settings require at least 800MB of available graphics memory. Also, if the card we're benchmarking doesn't offer the performance to handle 2560x1600 across most of our titles reliably, only 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 will be utilized. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos whatsoever. The possible exception might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. Though it's not a game, it essentially acts as a robust timedemo. We choose to use it as it's a standard where GPU reviews are concerned, and we don't want to rid our readers of results they expect to see. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 2.98, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. Call of Duty: World at...

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 Super Overclock

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Rob Williams