Today we bring you the full view on the latest GeForce GTX 260 card with 216 shaders. We've so far discovered that this card clearly has the upper hand when compared to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, but we've also seen how the new drivers significantly improve its performance. Many of NVIDIA's partners jumped at the opportunity to overclock GT200 core on these GeForce GTX 260 cards, which are reinforced with some additional shaders. These extra shaders will be very useful in their battle with ATI for the price to performance ratio. XFX named the card Black edition, something they do with the crème of the crop cards, and it's our privilege to put it through its paces today for your reading pleasure. - FudZilla

XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Core 216 Design Review

Besides the sheer strength that this card packs, you'll surely like the gift game that XFX ships with this card, namely Far Cry 2. Looks wise, you can't tell the GeForce GTX 260 cards apart, since they all feature reference cooling, which in this case does a good job. The Black edition is, of course black, and looks quite nice, but we prefer what's hidden under the hood. The GeForce GTX 260 will let you play any games without thinking about dreaded recommended and minimum requirements, and the fact that NVIDIA recommends this card as the best one for playing this year's games speaks for itself as the obvious choice as such.

Of course, there are better boards like the Radeon HD 4870 X2 or the GeForce GTX 280, but price wise the GeForce GTX 260 is much closer to the consumer market. With 896MB of GDDR3 memory, which is in this case overclocked by 300MHz over reference 2000MHz, you can be sure that memory won't be a bottleneck. The memory bus is 448-bit, which results in 128.8GB/s bandwidth. The core runs at 666MHz and the shaders at 1404MHz. These are quite high figures and they even allow the Black edition card to run on par with reference GeForce GTX 280's at times which is a great added value for all gamers.

The box is painted black to go with the name, and if you look closer you will see small Far Cry 2 and 666MHz stickers saying that you will get a great gift and a speed demon card all in one package. XFX really knows their stuff and these guys overclocked the card so high that even the GeForce GTX 280 can feel the ground shaking beneath its feet. Running at evil 666MHz, the card can take anything you throw at it and it beats the old GeForce GTX 260 with only 192 shader processors by around twenty percent. The card comes with a gift game Far Cry 2, a gift that anyone buying this graphics card will surely like.

XFX stuck to the reference cooling, but don't worry as the card runs quiet and cool. You will need two PCI Express power connectors to power this card, but that's usual in this performance range. We've no other choice than to recommend this card to anyone, so that it can keep them warm through cold winter nights.