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Leadtek GTX 260 Extreme + tested

by on02 February 2009

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Review: A great bang for a modest buck

 

The graphics card we prepared for you today is called WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+, and as you already know, the Geforce GTX 260 is a great gaming card, decently priced and appealing to many gamers. It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed Leadtek’s graphics cards, and we’re quite glad that Leadtek decided to send this card, as you’ll surely find it interesting. This is a new 55nm version of the GTX 260 card with 216 stream processors, whereas the old version was built in 65nm and had 192 stream processors. This card’s main contender, performance-wise, is the HD 4870 1GB, which is a tad slower and priced some €20 less. We were surprised to see Leadtek’s WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+ to be one of the lowest priced GTX 260 cards, especially knowing that it has factory overclocked core and shaders and a free gift game Overlord. At press time, the card is available at €220, which is only €5 more than the cheapest reference GTX 260 card. Before we move onto the results, let us talk about the specs and visuals a bit.

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We see that Leadtek’s WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+ is no different than the reference GTX 260, except for the sticker of course. The card kept the reference cooling that deserves praise, despite not being the quietest around. That’s not to say that it’s loud, far from it as it presents a great compromise between cooling and the golden silence. The fan is at the end of the cooler and it pushes the hot air towards the I/O panel where the outlets release the air out of the case. Such a scenario is, of course, always desirable as it lets the air out instead of keeping it in and letting it linger around your precious components.

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The picture on the box reminds us of the OCZ’s Geforce 8800 GTX card announced two years ago. Most of you probably don’t even know that OCZ temporarily entered the graphics market with then very popular 8800 GTX card. You can find out more about that here.

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Apart from the graphics card, in the box you’ll also find standard cables and the DVI-to-HDMI converter with an SPDIF cable. You’ll also get a user’s manual, driver CD (w/WinFox II) and the Overlord game.

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The card is nicely wrapped, as you can see from the picture below. In fact, it’s been a while since we’ve seen a card as wrapped as Leadtek’s WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+. The card comes in a standard antistatic bag, but it’s pre-wrapped in plastic used by Leadtek alone it seems, and only then will you find the plastic from the previous photo, a standard wrapping for most of today’s graphics cards.

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The card is powered via two 6-pin PCI Express connectors, which is also the case with the new 55nm GTX 280.

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The I/O panel features an HDTV and two dual-link DVI outs, which can be used as HDMI outs if you use the aforementioned adapter. You’ll get the adapter together with the SPDIF cable, which you’ll need if you want to use just one cable to bring both video and audio to your TV device. One end of the cable goes into the graphics card (the connector is next to the power connectors) and the other goes into the SPDIF out on your motherboard/soundcard.

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Leadtek WinFast GTX 260 Extreme+ comes factory overclocked, but note that it’s not that high an overclock. The core runs at 602MHz which is only 26MHz more than the reference 576MHz. The memory is still at reference speed of 999MHz (1998MHz effectively).However,  Leadtek’s card has nice further overclocking potential, which we’ll show you a bit later. For now, you should now that we had no trouble pushing it up by 100MHz.

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Unlike the previous GTX 260 card, the current version of the card has no protective “hood” on the back of the card. It comes with 896MB of GDDR3 memory at 1998MHz. All the modules are located around the GPU on the front of the card, and they’re all in contact with the cooler, thus improving the cooling. It’s exactly that which helped us in pushing the memory all the way to 2400MHz. 

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The card features a 448-bit memory interface, compared to the 512-bit on the GTX 280. Such a strange number is a direct result of disabling one ROP partition. The equation is pretty simple – each of the 8 ROP partitions on the GTX 280 is connected to the 64bit memory controller, and after a simple multiplication you’ll get the final number – 512. Since the GTX 260 has 7 ROP partition, the same equation results in the 448-bit memory interface. Each of the memory controllers houses two memory chips, so the GTX 260 needs 14 chips to reach the 896MB capacity. One ROP partition comes with 4 ROP units totaling at 28 ROPs for the card.

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Last modified on 02 February 2009
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