We’ve already looked at nVidia’s flagship product- the GeForce GTX 280 and today we have the more affordable GTX 260 card- two of them actually. Both these cards are overclocked out of the box giving better performance than your stock card would. Like most of their previous overclocked cards, ASUS called their product the TOP edition while Zotac sticks to its own terminology- the AMP! Edition. The difference between the GTX 280 and GTX 260 are presented in the table below along with the speed gains that ASUS and Zotac bring with their cards. Lets find out if any of them is worthy of your Dirhams. | | Stock GeForce GTX 280
| Stock GeForce GTX 260
| ASUS GTX 260 TOP
| Zotac GTX 260 AMP!
| Graphics Clock
| 602 MHz | 576 MHz | 650 MHz
| 650 MHz
| Processor Clock
| 1,296 MHz | 1,242 MHz
| 1,400 MHz
| 1,400 MHz
| Processor Cores
| 240 | 192 | 192 | 192
| Memory Clock
| 1,107 MHz | 999 MHz
| 1,150 MHz
| 1,050 MHz
| Memory Interface
| 512 bit
| 448 bit
| 448 bit
| 448 bit
| Memory Size
| 1GB | 896 MB
| 898 MB
| 898 MB
| Texure Filt. Units
| 80 | 64
| 64
| 64
| Texture Fill Rate
| 48.2 GigaTexels/s
| 36.9 GigaTexels/s
| 45.5 GigaTexels/s
| 45.5 GigaTexels/s |
Packaging Asus bundles their GTX 260 TOP is a smaller box than some of their previous cards which makes it easy to carry. We must say that the mostly plain green background with the hunter lady isn’t the best we’ve seen from ASUS and could very easily be overlooked by a potential buyer. Inside that box we found a leather mouse pad and CD holder, video cables, DVI adapter, PCI-e power converter, Drivers CD and the manual. Zotac, on the other hand, comes nicely packaged in a rust/orange box with dragon picture on the front that will certainly attract the attention of a gamer. Inside it we found a DVI adapter, HDMI Adapter, Audio cable, Video cable, two PCI-e power converter, Drivers CD, user manuals and a Zotac badge sticker. Also included in the package is the full version of the very recently released game Grid. Needless to say, Zotac certainly has more impressive packaging than ASUS.
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