280 GTX

It may not have garnered as much attention as it's rivals, but the GPU on the XFX GTX 280 still makes for a decent card, especially since the price drop.

With all the recent fuss over ATI's 4870 X2 card, it's no wonder the green camp are bristling a little. However, all is not lost if you are an nVidia fan boy, they do have one hell of a hefty card that's supposed to be hot on the heels of ATI's top dog. Perhaps with some overclocking we could coax enough performance out of it to take back the crown? Today I'm testing out XFX's GTX 280 card, and it's a monster.

260 GTX

The 280 has a little sibling in the 260 GTX, which this Palit card is based on. Overclockers Club put it through it's paces.

After seeing the headroom still left on EVGA's GTX 260 FTW card, I was expecting big things from the Palit GTX 260. Initially I was slightly disappointed that I could not match the overclocking ability of the EVGA card, but when you sit back and think, you realize that this is not a factory overclocked card. As such, it is binned a little lower, and costs a little bit less as well. What I did get from the card was 128MHz on the GTX 260 core, 112MHz on the memory, and 276MHz on the Shader clocks. As a percentage, the increases equal out to an 18% jump in the GPU core speed, 10% on the memory, and almost 20% on the Shader clocks. All of these increases are pretty substantial, and provide a serious performance boost when the CPU does not bottleneck the system's performance.

Case and Cooling

Danger Den Tower-26 Case Review @ HardwareLogic .:. In Win Metal Suit - GunDam Case @ TechwareLabs .:. Noctua NH-C12P reviewed @ BurnOutPC .:. CoolerMaster GeminII S CPU + Board Cooler @ TechwareLabs

Memory and Motherboards

OCZ DDR2 PC2-9200 Flex II memory @ Neoseeker .:. Gigabyte GA-EP45T-EXTREME DDR3 Motherboard Review @ Hardware Canucks .:. J&W RS780UVD-AM2+ mATX Motherboard Review @ OCIA