The holiday season is upon us and there are a slew of new game releases out for the PC. And one of the burning questions when buying games during a holiday season is what hardware to best run the games on. After all, while the integrated graphics of the Intel G45 chipset are much improved in features and performance over the previous generations, no gamer will want to play a game with those integrated graphics. Recent releases have taken the sub-$300 graphics chip to a new level of performance and features. However, as a gamer wanting the best out of a high-end system the specs of the $200-300 price range with the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 should be looked at. - Motherboards

XFX GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Black Design Review

Today's release of the big bang drivers from NVIDIA means that there will be substantial performance increases in the performance of their cards. XFX sent a GeForce GTX 260 Black edition card and we took the opportunity to test it today with both the video card test platform and a few new games that have been released in recent weeks to show performance with the latest drivers in the latest hottest games. With this article we hope to answer the question which video card is the best bang for the buck for the $200-300 price range this holiday season and what games that really stands out from the others.

Now the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 architecture should look familiar to anyone having seen their launches the last few months as it is identical to the GeForce GTX 260 in virtually every respect except for one, the number of processors. The original GeForce GTX 260 had just 192 shaders while the new version has 216 shaders as the name suggests. And NVIDIA also states that the entirety of their production of GeForce GTX 260's should be based upon the 216 core variant, meaning that the older variant will be phased out. The GeForce GTX 260 is based upon NVIDIA's GT200 chip and currently still on the 65nm process.

XFX chose to use the reference design for the GeForce GTX 260 Black edition. This is a good thing as modifying the reference design can cause problems with the thermal dissipation and testifies to NVIDIA's design expertise, as the XFX card is clocked over 90MHz higher than the reference clocks. The heatsink is colored black hence the name of the card. The GeForce GTX 260 Black edition card supports 3-way SLI with two golden finger bridges on the top of the card to facilitate this. Note that using a different GeForce GTX 260 with the XFX card is not recommended as the XFX card is highly overclocked.

So there are really two takes on this video card today. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition is the fastest available GeForce GTX 260 card on the market with a clock speed exceeding the reference speeds. At this moment the price point on the card is $299 after rebate from Newegg. The obvious competition at the moment is the ATI Radeon HD 4870 cards and the performance spectrum is interesting on both. The higher clock speed versus the standard GeForce GTX 260 cards allows for near GeForce GTX 280 performance levels, which is quite an achievement from a gamer's point of view and gaming experience.

The second take on the GeForce GTX 260 Black edition is not performance on the games of yesterday but the games of today. In that respect this card really does a great job as the performance outstrips the ATI camp in virtually every way in the five games we tested that were released in the last couple of months or today with Left 4 Dead. These five games make a good starting point for our next video card test platform which may include Intel Core i7 CPU's and an Intel X58 based motherboard to allow both SLI and CrossFire testing to be done on a single platform. But that is not for today as these are not yet widely available.

Buying a card to fit your budget is hard as the market has so many cards and chips that it is confusing for the people who check out a card to buy themselves. Rebates and game bundles like Far Cry 2 make a card like the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition easy to recommend if you are buying a card in this price range. With great warranty programs and service it's easy to recommend the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 version as a very solid gaming solution in the $300 price range, and with many of the latest gaming titles having the meant to be played on NVIDIA, it shows NVIDIA clearly working hand in hand with developers.