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Page 1 of 4  The interesting thing is that we didn’t have up to now GTX260 graphics card on test, probably because majority is already more interested for more affordable products from latest nVIDIA generation of graphics cards even though it is consisted, for now, from two products in total. Anyway, we got one GTX260 for testing and it is signed by manufacturer that is worldwide known – MSI.
Package and bundle
Package for this MSI product is as usual colorful and rather large with lot of “stickers”. In package with card itself we found necessary cables which are reduced on “molex to 6-pin” and S-Video cable and VGA-DVI converter. Drivers are also present and also two of old well –known games: one is based on Tolkien’s most popular book Lord of the Rings: Online, while the other one wear name of, now deceased, rally driver Colin McRae, yes we are talking about DIRT.
Graphics card
Situation with MSI graphics card is, as expected, identical to situation with all the rest manufacturers. Namely, like the other manufacturers and MSI applied solution of sticking over the sticker on cooler. So, design of that sticker has the same theme as the box, and all together fit nice with box design. When it comes to cooling solution, GTX280 with its “younger brother” shares the same cooling solution and keeping that in mind, it will be clear even to the common user, that this cooler will have better efficiency for N260GTX which, by the rule as derivate, generates less heat than advanced (GTX280) model.
If you don’t have some uber PSU instead of yours mid class category PSU with one 8-pin and one 6-pin connector, you shouldn’t despair. You will still be able to get GeForce GTX260 to do the work that requires only one 6-pin molex connector or, or in case you don’t have it, you could improvise by using two 4-pin connectors. This is possible thanks to fact that maximum consumption of GTX260 is for 55W less than for GTX280 model, which is relevantly ~25% difference. In general, temperatures are less so “blower” type fan hardly goes into high gear which only results in almost constant silence and leaves a very positive impression. On the picture you can see “print screen” for GTX260 temperatures, but you should take these results with slight reserve, because this card was tested during big temperature drop time period.
Pop the hood
Under the hood, or more precisely cooler, is placed “weakened” GTX200 chip in comparison to GTX280. Of course, manufacturing process still didn’t change a bit, which means that chip is made in 65nm process. Chip’s surface amounts impressive 576 mm2 and under that area are packed 1.4 billion transistors. Differences in relation to GTX280 can be seen in reduced number of stream processors – 192. As consequence of that, GTX260 is deprived also for 16 texture units (64 in total), and also for 4 ROPs which count now 28 of them.
Clock of this card follow the standard that nVIDIA set, which actually means 576MHz for core, 1242 MHz for SP and 2GHz for memory. And there we come to yet another reduction in comparison to GTX280 – 896MB of memory, but even more important is narrower bus which is for GTX260 448 bits wide. This is far from big difference in reality, but nVIDIA still had to clearly differentiate its products so you could hardly reach performances of GTX280 even with the help of overclock. Here first of all we think on resolutions bigger than 1680x1050, while at 1680x1050 and (God forbid) lower resolutions you will get marginal differences. If you are interested in overclock of graphics cards, than you are already familiar with fact that for these derivates overclock possibilities are on higher level than for their stronger “role models”. The similar case is also with MSI N260GTX which hit its limits at 690MHz for core, mighty 1.5GHz for Stream processors and solid 2.37GHz for memory.
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Graphics cards 
