Pre-OC Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 and 260

Value and Conclusions

We’ve certainly seen that these overclocked cards can offer some quite impressive improvements in performance over their stock clocked competitors in most games, resolutions and anti aliasing settings. The overclocks translated almost directly into performance increases in some games, especially the GPU heavy Crysis.

However, in other circumstances the performance bottlenecked elsewhere on our test system, none more obvious than lower resolution tests in Half Life 2 where most of the cards topped out at around 120FPS average, being matched by the much cheaper Radeon HD 4870. World in Conflict at lower resolutions and less intensive settings also suffered from the same problems, with only minor differences between stock and overclocked cards.

While in some circumstances the advantages of a pre-overclocked card is obvious, the sophistication of modern GPUs is reaching the stage that at lower settings other components are becoming the limiting factor for gaming performance, making the GPU overclocks that these cards all charge a premium for quite meaningless.

However, at high resolutions and more intensive anti aliasing settings the advantages of a pre-overclocked card are clear across the full spread of benchmarks, with our batch of pre-overclocked cards comfortably besting their stock clocked opposition. In Crysis there was a consistent eight to ten percent performance improvement, but other games were as little as zero to three percent in lower resolutions and low anti aliasing settings, but as the settings went higher this changed to a five to nine percent improvement depending on the game.

The Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP! is especially impressive and offering performance improvements by as much as twenty percent in particular tests and on average the performance improvement percentage was greater than the Asus and BFG GeForce GTX 280. Considering the small premium the Zotac charges compared to the BFG and Asus too, there is certainly greater value in it.


While the performance advantages are obvious, the problem lies in justifying the extra cost that these advantages can bring. A stock clocked GeForce GTX 280 can now be had for as little as £305, whereas these overclocked models start at over £370. Is a sub-ten percent performance improvement of stock clocked models really worth an additional twenty percent on-top of the cost?

What you are buying is a pre-binned card with guaranteed overclock. Sure, you could get lucky with a non-oc'd card, but why waste good cores when they can be sold for a premium? So the chances of getting an reliable OCX level overclock from a non-OCX card is far less likely, unless future batches from Nvidia improve yields and die quality overall.

Then there’s the competition from ATI, who’s impressive Radeon HD 4870 and even HD 4850 cards continue to dent the attractiveness of both the GeForce GTX 260 and 280, by offering only marginally inferior performance, for a fraction of the cost of competing GeForce cards. Hell, for the price of the both the Asus and BFG GeForce GTX 280s, you can afford TWO Radeon HD 4870s and you’d still have enough cash left for a good night out. The same is true for the Zotac card – for the same money you could easily buy two Radeon HD 4850s, and enjoy superior anti aliasing performance into the bargain!

Then again, we're into multi-GPU territory here and limiting component choice, greater power use and overall diminishing returns. If you buy one card of high speed then you have enough headroom for future games, rather than buying two cards of lower speed to equal one bigger, right now.