The Verdict
You know, it's just really weird to test a card with an OC label on it, yet it's not overclocked at all. But granted the additional shader processors the Core 216 product have will guarantee you an additional 10 maybe 15% performance over the regular GTX 260 model so in a certain way that validates the OC label. I think another name would have been a bit more appropriate though. Fact is that for roughly 250-300 USD/EUR you can pickup this card, get the Core 216 SKU, and then tweak the living daylight out of it. It is no big deal to get the card running at GTX 280 performance at all, and that is a definite increase in value.
But yeah, The GeForce GTX 260 core 216 is in fact a GeForce GTX 280, with a small chunk of memory missing, and one shader cluster with 24 shader cores disabled. Other then that, there is just no difference whatsoever.
I've stated it in our previous GTX 260 Core 216 reviews already, but really the GTX 260 series at it's current price level offer a pretty big sack of performance. See far Cry 2 even with our bulky image quality settings still was pushing out an average framerate of 46 at 1920x1200. That's at very high image quality settings and 4xAA. Excellent stuff. The same thing can be said for Brothers In Arms: hell's Highway .. at 1920x1200 it's still pushing an average framerate of 50 FPS and overclocked at 60 FPS, making it faster than a GTX 280..
So the bottom line. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 260 OC is merely a notch faster than it's GTX 260 predecessor .. making it compete fiercely with the competitors best Single-GPU product. We were not really impressed by the bundle, that definitely could be changed a little, though we did like the extended 3 year warranty you receive with this product. None the less, the real trick is the new new pricing level. Add to that the additional performance and then the real candy .. the overclockability. It makes it a grand card to play your games with.
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