Indeed XFX is a well known manufacturer to most PC gamers. XFX specializes in PC video cards and motherboards featuring NVIDIA based GeForce GPU's and nForce core logic. Interestingly enough as well, XFX is moving towards being an AMD add-in-board partner as well, just as we reported to you back in November of last year. And it looks as if AMD cards from XFX will be available as soon as next week. XFX is also known for their transferrable lifetime warranties, even if the cooling device is modified or replaced. All that makes XFX one of those great brands to pick a graphics card from and today we are pleased to take a look at their new GeForce GTX 260 Black edition gaming series. - HardOCP

XFX GeForce GTX 260+ Black Gaming Edition Review

The original GeForce GTX 260 had a very respectable 192 stream processors. It has a reference design of 576MHz core frequency, 1242MHz shader frequency and 896MB of GDDR3 at 1998MHz on a 448-bit memory bus. Fast forward three months and NVIDIA launches a supplement to the GeForce GTX 260 by adding some enhancements to the original design. The new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 features an additional 24 streaming processors. That makes the new GeForce GTX 260 have a total of 216 stream processors. But however the reference clock rates, memory capacity and memory bus remain unchanged.

The XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition is manufactured with the later GT200 with 216 streaming processors. The Black edition has also stolen the crown from XFX's porn star line of cards, the XXX edition, and is now XFX's fastest GeForce GTX 260 video card offered. However, the devil is in the details and with the Black edition's GPU frequency of 666MHz it is 26MHz higher than their XXX edition's 640MHz. Though the remaining frequencies remain the same between the XXX and Black edition including a shader of 1440MHz speed, and with the 896MB of GDDR3 memory at 2300MHz. The box is your standard fare as usual.

We used NVIDIA's system tools to overclock the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition. We overclocked it by increasing the GPU clock until it failed, became unstable or received corrupted output and then decreased the GPU clock to the last stable setting. We then did the same to the memory while the GPU was overclocked. Then we spent some quality time with the overclock in a few games. And after taking the overclocking into our own hands, we were left with a 700MHz core, a high 1520MHz shader and 2440MHz memory frequency. These overclocks are very respectable since it was already factory overclocked.

The XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition did give us the best image quality, or at least tied for the best image quality, in every game we have tested. However, the actual improvement in game play experiences were mediocre at best in each case. We say this because the image quality benefits in the latest games using the Black edition weren't game changing in any sense of the word. There weren't huge game play advantages to be had with one video card over another. However, the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition does consistently outperform every card, if even by a little in some cases but it does come out on top each time.

Overall the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition was better. And we have to give kudos to XFX for including the full version game Far Cry 2. We have found it to be a very fun game and it has been very popular this season among gamers. So not only do you get a fast video card, but you get a great game that the video card does deliver in. XFX also has a transferrable lifetime warranty which is a great bonus. So if you are looking for the latest in GeForce GTX 260 performance the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black edition is the way to go.