The Card

With the package out of the way, let's look what's going on with the card itself. Straight away you see just how much it resembles the GTX 280 as far as the cooler goes.

The cooler manages to take up the whole front of the card while XFX have brightened it up a bit with a sticker that looks similar to the front of the box.

Turning the card over, we can see that XFX has gone to extended lengths to provide a sticker on the back of the card. If you find yourself with a window on the side of your case, you can display your GTX 260 loudly and proudly.

The top of the card shows us two SLI connectors while the other end gives us two PCI Express connectors and the port for the loop-back audio cable. This is actually the first time we've been able to tell the difference between the GTX 280 and GTX 260 with the latter having dual 6-pin while the 280 carries with it a single 6-pin and a single 8-pin connector.

The I/O side of things is exactly the same as the GTX 280 with two Dual Link DVI ports and a single TV-Out port. Of course, the card is also of the dual slot nature and has an exhaust area for the hot air to escape.

Specifications

The GTX 260 specifications just come in below the GTX 280 as expected. Stream Processors are down from 240 to 192, and Texture Addresses/Filters are down from 80 / 80 to 64 / 64. ROPs have dropped from 32 to 28, the core clock is at 575MHz, shader at 1242MHz and memory comes in at 1998MHz DDR on the 896MB of GDDR3.

The weird memory amount is thanks to the 448-bit memory bus width which is down from 512-bit on the GTX 280. The card of course uses the same 65nm GT 200 based core.

With this model being the XXX Edition from XFX, it's of course overclocked out of the box. The core has been bumped to 640MHz which we saw mentioned on the front of the box, and a memory clock of 2300MHz DDR has been set.