In the unending war between the two major GPU manufacturers, ATI/AMD and nVIDIA, you’ll find an array of light, medium, and heavy artillery dotting the battlefield. However in this current salvo, the guys in green have only brought the big and mid-size guns to the party. I’m of course talking about the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260, respectively.
We’ve already reviewed the high performance chipset, the GTX 280, so it’s time to take a look at the middle of the road. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 was released concurrently the GeForce GTX 280 as a mid-range version of that card. This pair of cards were released just 3 months after the GeForce 9 series, which caused a few eye brows to be raised. Some wondered if this was actually a new card, or another revamp of an old chipset. Thankfully that simply isn’t the case.
Though based on the same unified architecture, the GeForce GTX 2xx series cards use an all new NVIDIA chipset. Codenamed D10U-20 and D10U-30 for the GTX 260 and GTX 280 respectively, this chipset is bigger and more complex then the chipsets seen in the GeForce 9 series. It consists of 1.4 billion transistors covering a 575 mm² die surface area and is built on a 65 nm process. To date, this is the largest CMOS-logic chip that has been fabricated at the TSMC foundry. Luckily the cards themselves aren’t any bigger than previous generation top end cards.
The card that we’re looking at today is a factory overclocked GTX 260 from the folks at ZOTAC and goes by the name GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition. ZOTAC managed to push the GPU in this card to 640MHz and the memory to 1400MHz, which is a fair jump up from the stock GPU and Memory speed of 575MHz and 1000MHz respectively. This was able to be stuffed into a package that doesn’t deviate from the NVIDIA reference design for this card. A full run down of the specifications can be found on the product home page. As for pricing, ZOTAC’s pre-overclocked card goes for about $30 to $50 more then the street price of a standard GTX 260.
What’s in the Box?
Since the ZOTAC GTX 260 card is so similar to the previously reviewed ZOTAC GTX 280, it should come as little surprise that the accesories packaged with it are of equal similarity. With this card ZOTAC has included all the need accessories. For cables, they’ve included two power adapters to convert two 4-pin Molex connectors into one 6-pin PCIe connector. They’ve also included a VGA-to-DVI adapter, and the standard cable for component and S-video outputs. An added bonus that has been seen more frequently in video card packages is the DVI-to-HDMI convertor, which makes sense with the prevalence of HD equipment in the home. To further augment that adapter, an SPDIF cable is included so you can use the audio channel on the HDMI connection.
Much like the GTX 280, ZOTAC has included with the GTX 260 AMP! an installation guide, user manual, and of course the drivers disk. They also included the same game with the GTX 260 AMP!, Race Driver: GRID, which was released on June 3 of this year.
So I’ve talked about the similarities between the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition and it’s GTX 280 bigger brother. I’m left wondering, as I’m sure you are, where the differences lie. This card is overclocked from the factory, so it’ll be interesting to see how much of a performance difference that makes.
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First Impressions
Like many other GTX 260 based video cards, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition is fairly similar in design to the more powerful GTX 280 based cards. The heatsink is practically the same, with the same variable speed fan and cooling configuration.
Moving to the rear of the card, we do find one minor change in the GTX 260. There’s still two DVI ports and a video out port on the end. There’s also an exhaust above the ports. So what’s changed? Well the status LED is no longer present on the GTX 260 card. I know…huge difference.
Behind the ports you’ll find the SLI connectors. Like the GTX 280 this card supports triple SLI, so there are two ports to allow for the required SLI bridge. When not in use, the SLI connectors are concealed by an included rubber cover.
Moving to the rear of the card, we find another simple difference. Even though the chipsets used in the GTX 280 and GTX 260 are similar, the card supporting the latter needs less power. This means that the GTX 260 based card has two 6-pin PCIe power connectors, compared to the one 8-pin and one 6-pin found on the GTX 280.
Even though the power requirements for the ZOTAC GTX 260 AMP! are less then the GTX 280, the memory on the card still gets just as hot. Since both cards have RAM on either side of the card, they require some form of cooling on both sides. Unfortunately the shell on the ZOTAC GTX 260 seems to be as difficult to remove as the shell of the GTX 280, so I was unable to get any good pictures of what lies beneath.
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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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BioShock
Our gaming tests kick off with the well known and highly praised BioShock. This game is a test of both DX9 and DX10 technologies, and its underwater setting can really push a rendering engine to the peak of performance. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that the GTX 260 AMP! and the GTX 280 are neck and neck in terms of performance. I expected the overclocking done on the card to be of benefit, but I didn’t expect this. I’m curious if this may be an inconsistency in the way FRAPS (the software used to generated these results) benchmarks performance. We’ll have to see further on.
Playability wasn’t an issue. At these frame rates, most of the areas I travelled through never lagged and barely ever dropped below 40 FPS. There are supposedly areas of the game that are extremely tortuous on a video card, but being that I’m too busy benchmarking, writing, and working, I’ve never reached these areas.
Supreme Commander
Our only RTS title in benchmarking is Supreme Commander, and it comes with a built in benchmark that produces a composite test similar to what 3DMark uses. Once again our testing using this benchmark turned up some interesting results, with the GTX 260 AMP! posting results similar to those seen in the 9800GTX we reviewed near the beginning of the year. Still the performance difference between the GTX 260 AMP! and the GTX 280 aren’t that significant, with only a 2% difference between the two cards.
It’s really hard to find an RTS game that truly tests modern video cards. With that said, it’s pretty clear that gameplay in Supreme Commander was nothing more than smooth and clean with the GTX 260 AMP!. The many battles between the three factions in that game were rendered beautifully.
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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
From a future battlefield in a top down view, it was time to move to a modern battlefield in a first person view. Call of Duty 4 is an extremely popular FPS title, with a following some say rivals that of CS. Though I may doubt that, I don’t doubt that the GTX 260 AMP! performs rather well in this title. It’s still 27% slower then the GTX 280, but it still manages to average over 100 FPS, which is nothing to sneeze at.
With frame rates like that, it isn’t surprising that every minute I spent playing CoD4 was spent having to not worry about frame drops and video card related lag. Gameplay was smooth and clean, and everything was stunningly rendered.
Crysis
Though the games I’ve shown in testing thus far can look quite nice, none come close to the potential visual complexity presented by Crysis. This game has such a powerful rendering engine that given the right equipment, it’s hard to tell the difference between in-game graphics and real life. We went with the more modest “High” setting for our benchmarks, and weren’t disappointed. Though 35 FPS is far lower than what we’ve seen in our other games thus far, with Crysis it’s nothing to sneeze at consider the more powerful GTX 280 only manages 40 FPS.
At these frame rates, frame drops and lag due to lack of performance are inevitable. Though most of the game was quite playable, there were areas and situations that made the video card crack under pressure a couple times. Running a dual card steup seems to be the only way to render Crysis in all its glory at high framerates.
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Final Thoughts and Conclusion
After all the testing, we are left with one simple conclusion. That conclusion is that the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition performs extremely well compared to its big brother, the GTX 280. Its posted numbers are higher then most stock clocked GTX 260 cards, and comes close to matching the performance of the GTX 280 in a couple tests that we ran. It’s definitely a decent card at a price that is a little easier to swallow than the premium charged by its bigger brother.
Still the card isn’t without its caveats. The biggest one is the question one asks themselves when purchasing such a card; is having the manufacturer perform the overclock worth the price premium? In most cases it is, as overclocking done by one self is never guaranteed to work at a certain speed, and may void your warranty or fry your card in one swoop. However, most cards can and will do these speeds without blinking given the quality of the silicon these days. However, most people are content with paying the “overclock tax” and having a guaranteed experience out of the box.
In the end we have a decently priced video card with a decent performance profile. It may not quite be in budget card territory, but the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition is definitely hard to ignore. The only thing holding it back is that it’s not the best card. Still it performs very well, and for that it deserves much praise from us. Not to mention, ZOTAC just recently increased their warranty to a full 5 years so if you keep your card that long, it’s nice to know the company has your back.
Pros
- High performance for mid-range card
- Decent price
- Complete retail package
- Factory overclocked and covered under warrany
- Five Year Warranty
Cons
- Price premium for factory overclock
Overall Rating: 8.5/10
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