It’s a video card bonanza right now. New video cards have been flying out of the doors from both ATI/AMD and NVIDIA, from the 3870 X2 and 48XX series from ATI to the 9-series, and now the latest from NVIDIA – the GTX 200 series. The GTX 260 is really nothing more than slightly de-tuned GTX 280; the GTX 260 uses 192 stream processors, 898MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1000MHz, and 1.4 billion transistors on the 65nm core that is clocked at 576MHz. With those credentials, the GTX 260′s performance should be able to hang close to it big brother, the GTX 280. With the massive parallel computing capabilities of the Palit GTX 260, it is able to use NVIDIA’s CUDA technology to perform complex scientific calculations (Folding@Home), as well as offload the burden of video transcoding from the CPU to the GPU. After seeing the performance of the GTX 280, and an overclocked GTX 260, you have to wonder just how a stock clocked card will perform.

If the performance of the Palit GTX 280 is any indication of the performance potential of the GTX 200 series video cards, then this looks to be another high performing example. Will the Palit GTX 260 be able to match the overclocking capabilities of the EVGA FTW edition that OverclockersClub recently reviewed? Will it be able to be pushed farther? I will have to find out.

• http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/palit_gtx260/