I recently had the opportunity to purchase an eVGA GTX 260 for $209.99 after MIR and instant rebates. I decided to jump on this, as it was from Newegg and also had free shipping with a promo code. A good deal I couldn’t pass up! I received the card a few days later, but had been snuffed out of using it right away because I was in the midst of a RAM RMA. Once I got my ram back, it was locked and loaded, and ready to rock.

Summing up this card is simple, in one phrase: solid as hell.

Tech Specs

The GTX 260 from eVGA that I have is NOT the core 216 variety, which boasts 216 processor cores(hence the name of Core 216), where as mine has 192. I doubt this is a huge difference, and mine still boasts some pretty impressive specs!

eVGA GTX 260

576MHz Clock Speed
192 Processing Cores
896MB DDR3 Memory
2000MHz (Effective)
448bit Interface
111.9GB/s Bandwidth
Supports DirectX 10, CUDA, PhysX and PureVideo HD

Physical Dimensions

As far as physical demands of this card, there is a lot to be said.

It uses two slots on your expansion area, so if you want to SLI these, make sure that you have enough room for both cards and any other peripherals you might have using expansion slots. The reason for both slots is clearly the raw size of the fan required to keep the processor cool. The first slot is taken up by the card and all of the capacitors and other things soldered onto the PCB, the second slot is the entire fan compartment which pulls air from inside the case and exhausts it out the back of your case.

Physical Dimensions of the GTX 260

The card is very long. In my standard ATX Mid Tower, it is mere centimeters from colliding with the hard drive cage. I am forced to lose one hard drive slot because of the length of the card. Essentially, if you case is not using a turned hard drive cage or you are using all of your hard drive slots, this card will not fit your case. I seriously recommend a ATX Full Tower or a wide Mid Tower for fitting this card.

Due to the length of the card, they thankfully decided to mount the power plugs onto the side of the card in such a fashion that it does not add any length to the card. The picture on the left illustrates what I mean and shows how tight of a squeeze this card really is.

Performance

This card performs well on the set of games I tried it on. I don’t have solid benchmark results to share, but on Fallout 3, World of Warcraft, and Crysis, I maintained 40+ fps on high settings (max settings for WoW) with at least 4x AA with the lowest point being in the 20-30 fps range in heavy fire-fights on Crysis.

Fallout ran much more solid with 8x and 16x AA than Crysis did, but this is likely a fault in the underlying code for Crysis, which is far more demanding on its settings than it probably needs to be. I believe this was fixed in Crysis: Warhead which performs much better on the same settings and demands less resources, though I haven’t actually tried this myself.

Physx

A major feature of this card is on-board Physx processing so that you no longer need to install a Physx dedicated card. This means that you get Physx capable games without purchasing and expensive add-on card that is not used on many games.

This is a major leap because it allows advanced physics processing for the price of a single graphics card. This will hopefully force more game designers to take advantage of the physics processing power on these cards and include it more in their games. The obvious intended outcome is that all games include some form of physics code that nVidia cards can take advantage of.

With any hope, in the next few years, physics processing will be the standard in games to create further realism where its desired.

Conclusion

Now that ATI has a comparable card (the 4870) the price wars are now fully on. This means you can likely get either a GTX 260/280 or 4850/4870 for very cheap as compared to a few months ago. There is no reason, at this point, why you shouldn’t be able to strap some of the best graphics processors into your computer.

With any luck, in the short future, the prices will come down so cheap that you can afford to step up to the next best card without breaking the bank every time. Hopefully the days of $600 graphics cards are well behind us.