The GeForce GTX 260 is currently the most affordable solution from the most high-end GPU family from NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 200 series, especially now that NVIDIA is promoting a massive price cut. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 XXX edition is an overclocked version of GeForce GTX 260 card. This means that it is coming at a slightly higher price compared to the standard version, but does come with higher performance. And XFX surely has an outstanding repution on that aspect as a whole. How does it compare to the standard GTX 260 and to its main competitors? Is it worthwhile paying a little bit more and getting this version instead of the standard GeForce GTX 260 graphics version? - Hardware Secrets

XFX GeForce GTX 260 (GT200) Triple-X Board Review

The GeForce GTX 260 card standard clocks are 576MHz for the GPU, 1242MHz for the shader processors and 1998MHz effective for the memories. The main difference between the GeForce GTX 260 and the top of line GeForce GTX 280 is the number of shader processors, memory interface and memory size, besides the clock rates of course. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 XXX version though runs at 640MHz with its shader processors running at 1363MHz and memories running at 2300MHz effective, clock rates that are higher than the GeForce GTX 280's. But this GPU has less shader processors and a narrower memory interface.

With these many results presented, we will make a summary of how is XFX GeForce GTX 260 XXX edition against the standard GeForce GTX 260, the GeForce GTX 280 and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870, which is today the main competitor to the standard GeForce GTX 260 graphics card. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 XXX version was up to twenty percent faster than the standard GeForce GTX 260, depending on the program and video configuration. You will achieve, on average, a ten percent performance increase with this overclocked model from XFX, which is quite interesting, as it costs around an equal ten percent more.

Paying ten percent more to have roughly ten percent more performance looks very attractive, especially when you think that price and performance usually don't increase at the same proportion. And what is very interesting is that the overclocked GeForce GTX 260 is about twenty percent faster than the red competition in form of the Radeon HD 4870 card. And you have to keep in mind that this card can be had for about $325 which is quite a good price at the moment with the game Call of Duty 4 included.