GTX 260

Well, it has graced me with it's presence. The GTX 260 was sitting on my bed when I arrived home from work. I quickly set to work opening the shipping box, and removing the internals.

Such a beautiful box. Lets see the back.

Alright, down to business, let's open it up...

The Accessories...

The treasure at last.



And now we get to take it out of the packaging. The card must weigh about 4 pounds...

The size in comparison to my arm. The card is 10.5" long...

Out of its anti-static packaging.

This card in particular has no backplate. This denotes that it's the 55nm revision.

Here is my case, with the 8800GT installed. It does look a little messy cable wise, and it's dusty for sure, but there is a clean path from front to back for airflow. All cabling is tucked as close to the back panel as possible.

This is a size comparison between the 8800GT and the GTX260. The card is MASSIVE.

And here would be an awful picture of the GTX 260 installed.

Now, stock clocked, the card comes in at 576/1242/999 [Core/shader/memory], And I managed to overclock it a little bit. Its currently sitting at 700/1500/1140. It passes 10 rounds of the crysis warhead benchmark tool without any artifacting or locking up, and max recorded temps durring the bench were 74 degrees celcius. EDIT: Well, I tested stability in Warhead today, and after playing for about 10 minutes, I got some massive artifacting. I decreased the clocks to superclocked speeds, [626/1350/1107] and everything runs fine now. EDIT2: Well, looks like the memory on this card just sucks, so I have it clocked at 650/1400/1050 now, and I don't see any artifacts in any games. Oh well, for what I'm playing, more than fast enough. I managed to pump out an average framerate of 30.71 at 1680x1050, all enthusiast settings, no anti-aliasing. I beleive my average framerate was still around 30, playing through the first level on high settings. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. I really like the fact that the card underclocks itself while in regular 2D mode, or low power 3D mode. Very energy efficient.

Anyway, that was my blog post for tonight. I'll be playing through FarCry 2 over the next 2 days, and I hope that impresses me, as I've been waiting. [Oh, I already have a copy, the one that came with the GTX 260 is going to be sold with the 8800GT.]

Cheers,

It's on its way.

Hoorah! My GTX 260 Core 216 is on the way, [55nm from what I hear] and for a hell of a lot less than I thought it'd be. Ncix had the wonderful XFX model on for 240 dollars, with a 30 dollar mail in rebate. I paid 297 after shipping and taxes. [Just a shout for Purolator, you're amazing.] Stellar deal if you ask me. Of course, there were only 30 of them, so I scooped one up quick. XFX being my favorite graphics card manufacturer, after all. The bundle also includes Farcry 2, which of course I already have, so I'll be selling that along with my 8800GT. I'm hoping to get around 140 out of both of them together, as that would bring the cost of the card down to less that half of the cost after shipping/taxes/MIR. The best part about this is, the card arrives Monday. I work durring the day, get off at 4:30, and have the next two days off! So that means 2 whole days of GTX 260-lovin' for Jon. My plans are to test frame rates in Battlefield 2142, then play through Farcry 2 after overclocking.

I was also quite suprised today when I got home from work, to find a package from Nick on my desk. I open it up, and inside lies Sins Of A Solar Empire. I guess me talking to him the night previous about him taking half of my games to trade in must have motivated him to get me it. *cough cough*. Anyway, if you don't know what Sins is, please, do yourself a favor, and download the demo. I was simply blown away by the scale and complexity of the game, yet it's easy to pick up and play for a few hours. And trust me, you'll have to play for a few hours if you want to finish a match. It took me 5 hours to beat a single AI on a small sized map. Something like 18 planets. I finally did it though. =P I do strongly suggest giving the demo a try, and supporting Stardock and their lack of DRM, if it really matters to you. The fact that the game is only 30 dollars is a godsend as well. No disc in the drive, and you only need the CD key to play online/ update.

I've also been playing with the beta of Windows 7 on the Acer Aspire One. Actually, I'm currently posting from that right now. The beta is nice and snappy, and seems like a very viable alternative to XP for netbooks. The interface is nice, the new paint/calculator is nice, the ability to disable almost any windows component is a godsend too. I really do enjoy the new aero peek, and the mouse gestures. So far, I'd say I prefer it over XP on my Aspire One, just because of the interface. I'll be upgrading the AAO to 1.5Gb of RAM here soon, so that should improve performance vastly. [Idling at 500Mb of RAM!? Oh my! It's not that bad though. Firefox open with 4 heavy tabs along with anti virus software nets me 570Mb used.] I'll be sure to post an update.

Cheers,