Pre-OC Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 and 260

Testing Time!

As we’ve already heavily tested the reference cards, we decided to use the exact same testing setup to put these overclocked Geforce cards through their paces.

As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times and an average of those results is what we’re reporting here. In the rare case where performance was inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.

The tests performed are a mixture of custom in-game timedemos and manually played sections with FRAPs to record the average and minimum frame rates. We strive to not only record real-world performance you will actually see, but also present the results in a manner that is easy to digest.

Whilst benchmarking these overclocked cards, we received some results that have caused us to retest some of the cards we featured last week. This is due to the increased sensitivity required when testing cards with such similar speeds and specifications.

ATI Test System

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz);
  
• Asus Maximus Formula motherboard (Intel X38 Express with two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots);
  
• 2x 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-1T);
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive;
  
• Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86-64 (with Service Pack 1);
  
• ATI Catalyst 8.6
  
• Intel inf 8.3.0 WHQL.

Nvidia Test System

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz);
  
• XFX nForce 780i SLI motherboard (with two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots);
  
• 2x 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 5-5-5-12-1T);
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive;
  
• Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000W PSU; Windows Vista Ultimate x86-64 (with Service Pack 1);
  
• Nvidia Forceware 175.19 / 177.41
  
• Nvidia 9.64 Nforce drivers

Games Tested

• Crysis, version 1.21 (64-bit) with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0
  
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, version 1.5 with DirectX 9.0
  
• World in Conflict, version 1.007 with DirectX 10
  
• Assassins Creed, version 1.0 with DirectX 10/10.1
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2, with DirectX 9.0
  
• Race Driver: GRID, version 1.1 with DirectX 9