The dominance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 didn't last very long as AMD quickly released the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 and more recently the Radeon HD 4870 X2 which we checked yesterday. However, as normal with most NVIDIA partners overclocked cards have started to come out and a few of them show some promise. It is quite typical from NVIDIA to soon after the initial release of their new series to grant their partners to bring out pre-overclocked versions. This is just what makes the market so interesting and variable. Today we'll be looking at the ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP edition which is one of this cards that comes overclocked out of the box. - AMDZone

ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP 896MB Graphics Review

From the initial look of things not much has changed with the new ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP as the Darth Vader black plastic shroud remains on the card. The ASUS sticker though is fairly unique with one of their CGI characters on the front of the heatsink as normal although this time in an interesting camocolor scheme. Not a radical physical change but a slight adjustment from the norm of video cards. The big changes happen under the hood where ASUS have overclocked the GeForce GTX 260 TOP version to a 650MHz core speed up from 575MHz of your standard clock which give it a nice boost.

The GDDR3 memory also sees a bump up to 2.3GHz from 1.9GHz which should help when the card is aching for memory bandwidth. ASUS has taken a stock GeForce GTX 260 and with their overclocked, TOP edition it now comes out ahead of of a standard Radeon HD 4870 thanks to some fancy overclocking. This shows that NVIDIA is a force to be reckoned with and it wouldn't take much for them to re-gain the lead. That said down the line we should also start to see overclocked versions of ATI cards which could put it back on top, it is really that close with these cards, though overclocking is more NVIDIA's strong game.

Ultimately it comes down to personal choice, the NVIDIA card runs cooler but the ATI card has support for DirectX 10.1 and better H.264 decoding support. Either card you can't go wrong with. The ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP version can be had for an excellent $269 after rebate. This put it in line with other Radeon HD 4870 cards so it does make it a good deal. You can get a Radeon HD 4850 for about $20 less though so it is also something to consider.