Testing
After spending most of this review highlighting the similarities between the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition and it’s GTX 280 bigger brother, it’s time to see how they differ. It’s also time to see whether or not the factory overclock helps this card out at all. To do this we installed to GTX 260 AMP! into the following test system.
- AMD Phenom 9850 2.5GHz Quad Core CPU
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard
- OCZ Platinum XTC REV.2 PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- Thermaltake DuOrb CPU Cooler
- NZXT Tempest Midtower ATX Case
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
We of course started our tests with 3DMark 06 and 3DMark Vantage, in an effort to establish some sort of baseline. Real world testing consisted of throwing a varied selection of games at the card and seeing how well it faired. Our Supreme Commander test makes a triumphant return, so this review won’t be all 3D shooters. So let’s find out how well the GTX 260 AMP! managed.
3DMark06
First up in our round of synthetic benchmarks is 3DMark06. Though this particular test may seem antiquated, it’s still a good measure of DirectX 9 performance. There are still a few popular titles out there that use DX9, and it’s nice to know exactly how a video card will affect your performance numbers in older games that you still play. In the case of the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition, it was only a marginal amount behind the more powerful GTX 280. This would definitely be due to the factory overclock found on the GTX 260 AMP!, as the purported overclock puts the speed of this card close to a stock clocked GTX 280.
3DMark Vantage
When we switch to DirectX 10 gaming, performance gaps start to widen. 3DMark Vantage is the finally released product from Futuremark that utilizes DX10 in all its glory to torture test modern video cards. Still we aren’t seeing double digit performance drops from the GTX 260, though the 9% difference in this benchmark is getting close.
Moving from the “Performance” preset to the “High” preset starts to widen the gap ever more. Now we see an 11% performance difference between the GTX 260 AMP! and it’s more powerful sibling. Things aren’t looking too bad for what would have been thought of as an underdog. The factory overclock is definitely helping matters. Hopefully these performance increases continue on into gaming test.
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