A few weeks back NVIDIA announced their GeForce GTX 200 series consisting of the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260. The GeForce GTX 280 is without doubt the fastest graphics card on the market, but will also rip the biggest hole in your wallet. The GeForce GTX 260 is a cut down version, which comes at a cheaper price point. Compared to its big brother, the GeForce GTX 260 features only 192 shaders, 28 raster operation units and 896MB of graphics memory. Also the clock speeds have been reduced a bit. Overall these changes result in a $200 cheaper card, which is about the price of a single Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, though delivering greater gaming pleasure. - techPowerUp

Point of View GeForce GTX 260 Version Card Review

Point of View's GeForce GTX 260 is a complete implementation of the NVIDIA reference design. One highlight however is the included Assassin's Creed full game in the package, which is one of the top titles at the moment. The package definitely highlights the included Assassin's Creed game, but when looking at the box in a rush you will barely make out that the product inside is a GeForce GTX 260 made my Point of View. A carrying handle on the package will let you carry your new card back to your lair from the shop. Point of View's GeForce GTX 260 looks exactly like their GTX 280, only the bottom will reveal the different model.

Just like the GeForce GTX 280, the GTX 260 uses a dual slot cooler. Like on all recent high-end cards from NVIDIA, the cooler is a quite complex piece of technology. The main cooling assembly uses a copper base to move the heat away from the GPU as fast as possible. If you look closely you can see the missing memory cooling pad on the front and the back. The SLI connector is hidden behind a rubber cover. You can combine up to three GeForce GTX 260 cards in SLI to get even more performance. Power to the card is supplied via two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors, and both are required for operation.

The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix and come rated 1.0ns chips which are good for 2000MHz clock speed. On the GeForce GTX 280 the faster 2400MHz chips are used, but in our overclocking tests the memory on our sample easily passed the 2400MHz mark. The NVIDIA massive GT200 series GPU comes with 1.4 billion transistors in a 65 nm process. Please note that the metal you see is not the GPU die, but the heatspreader on top of it. The final overclocks of our card are 715MHz core and 2508MHz memory. Both overclocks are absolutely stunning and easily handle running at GeForce GTX 280 speeds.

Even though the Point of View is a great card offering plenty of performance its success will be limited by AMD's Radeon HD 4870. At this time the Radeon HD 4870 is $100 cheaper while offering very similar performance. The only scenario where we could see the GeForce GTX 260 gain an advantage over the Radeon HD 4870 is when more than 512MB graphics memory is used, which may be the case when running ultra widescreen resolutions. Another advantage of NVIDIA's GPU's are that they have full support for CUDA's GPU accelerated computation and also their currently redesigned PhysX technology.

However, at this time there are not many applications for CUDA and/or PhysX but rest assured, NVIDIA will make sure this changes. The Point of View GeForce GTX 260 includes a unique game bundle with Assassin's Creed, a recently released top title. In order to fight ATI's products, NVIDIA will most probably reduce the price of the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 in the near future, so holding off for a bit with your purchase might be a good idea. Our GeForce GTX 260 sample showed amazing overclocking potential, easily reaching GeForce GTX 280 levels, which is something most ATI Radeon HD 4870's won't achieve.