In FarCry 2, the two fierce adversaries, the GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB, make a fierce stand-off. With antialiasing off, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB manages to snatch a win, but when we turned the antialiasing on, the tables turn. We can easily say that there’s no true winner, except on the highest tested resolution – 2560 x 1600 AA, where the GTX 260 manages to snatch a win with a result better by 11%.


















Overclocking

Leadtek didn’t try that hard on their overclocking, so we decided to overclock it even further. From Leadtek’s 602MHz, we easily reached 700MHz. Temperatures went up by 2 degrees Celsius and the card ran at 79 degrees, whereas the 602MHz speeds results in 77 degrees Celsius in 3D mode. In idle mode, we measured 44 degrees Celsius. Our system consumed about 260W while the card ran in 3D, whereas the idle mode results in about 100W lower consumption.



Overclocking the memory results in bandwidth increase from 111.9GB/s to 134.4 GB/s. 

Although the cooler and the back of the PCB feature would suggest this is the new 55nm graphics card, we used the latest beta of Everest 4.60.1626 tool in order to show you that the software recognizes the new GPU.



Towards the end of the info, Everest reports that the card will run at lower speeds in 2D mode. The same goes for less demanding 3D mode. To confirm that, we briefly turned on a 3D app and after we shut it down we made the following screenshot. You can see that the core downclocked to 300MHz and the memory to 100MHz. After a couple of minutes in idle mode, the temperatures decreased by 4 degrees Celsius.



The following tables show the overclocked card’s FarCry2 results.









After the overclocking, Leadtek card’s performance improved by 15%, compared to the 602MHz clocks, and while the reference GTX 260 lagged behind by 18%, Radeon ended up losing by as much as 31%.



Conclusion

Leadtek's WinFast GTX 260 Extreme + is a great gaming card that comes pre-overclocked to 602MHz. A great thing about this card is undoubtedly its price, as it’s one of the lowest priced GTX 260 cards. This is the latest version of the GTX 260 card and it comes with a 55nm core and 216 stream processors.

It runs quiet and dual-slot reference cooling does a great job. It even allowed us to reach 700MHz for the GPU and 2400MHz for the memory with no problem whatsoever. The card also comes with a gift game Overlord, and thanks to rock solid performance at a reasonable price point, it gets our Recommended award.