MetaGaming

This graphics card balances a bunch of things, performance, price, size, power consumption and quiet running.
There’s definately higher performance cards the GTX 280 core (hotter running, more power hungry) and the new GTX 285 and 295’s (much more money). This card sits right between the GTX 260 and 280 cards. Officially this is a GTX 260 core 216 graphics card.

Price wise, this card hits a pretty nice sweet spot, just above the $200 area. The other cards mentioned are significantly more expensive. If you want to spend less money, go for the Radeon’s or a 9800 or 8800 series Nvidia. There’s nothing wrong with any of those cards, they just have very little headroom anymore.

Size – well this is where things get really confusing and counterintuitive. I purchased an 8800GT overclocked card a while ago (this GTX 260 replaces that card). I thought, great, single slot, small card it will work great. Yes it ran great but the noise level was just awful especially while running folding at home, or a good solid graphics game. Come to find out, that dual slot deal is actually critical for cooling and silencing the card. Case air is brought in through the fan and exhausted out the back of the computer – no heat flying around the inside of your case. I even went down the path of adding a VGA cooler to that 8800GT, that just managed to blow hot air around the inside of my case.

This EVGA card is incredibly well constructed, super high quality materials, and attention to details. The outside plastic skirt is solid, no flexing. The fan is a squirrel cage style (not the standard blade type you are used to seeing) – that style fan moves a good amount of air with minimum noise. I actually love the graphics on this thing – I’m so happy to not see some goth looking female or video game gorrila guy, this is just simple mechancial and black. There’s even a really nice silver colored EVGA logo on the top.

They have finally moved the PCIe power connectors to the top of the card instead of the end, saving a bit of space. Two connectors are required – so make sure your power supply can handle this. I upgraded from 500W to an 850W supply with this card, Antec Signature Series 850W PSU ( SG-850 ), so nothing strains in my build.

This lives in an Antec P182 case (huge) on an Asus motherboard. I had to remove a hard drive from the center bay (now there are 4 drives in the downstairs bay). The card is just that long, it’s massively long. Measure your case carefully before you buy this card.

Why in the world EVGA does this is beyond me. But you have to have a pHD in their part numbers to buy one of these.
Anatomy of their part numbers:
896 is the amount of memory.
P3 don’t understand that number
1255 = 576MHz core speed
1257 = 626MHz (the card reviewed here)
1269 = 684MHz
AR = no software bundle
A1 = free software bundled (Mirror’s edge in this case)

This whole series is considered Superclocked – meaning they are all open to overclocking and come from the factory slightly overclocked, to a stable appropriate load temp.

This 1257-AR version comes bundled with EVGA’s Precision program – it’s a low resource use card tweaker and monitor. It’s very intuitive to use, and gives you total control over clock speed, shader speed, and memory speed. Pretty simple to use.

This card also has the step up program included. This means within 90 days of purchase EVGA applies full money paid to purchase a more expensive card from them. Go to their website for details.

There’s some sweet things included in this box. A DVI to HDMI adapter – totally cool. There’s also a very thin wire and connector that isn’t explained in the manuals. That wire is used to connect digital audio from your sound card or motherboard to the video card for output on the HDMI socket. Two Molex to 6 pin PCIe power connector (you’ll need two Molex connectors per PCIe plug). And a DVI to RGB adapter.

How does this perform? Really well thank you very much. I love Grid, and had to dial back the aniostropic filtering on the 8800GT. With this card, full up 4X no problems. Folding at home runs a good 25% to 100% faster than with the 8800GT. The fan tuning on the card favors the card running a bit warm – at idle, 40% fan, down in the 40 degrees C. Under solid load from folding, 43% fan at 75 degrees C. With the Evga precision program I ramped the fan up to 100% (and it does get a bit noisy) dropping the temperature almost instantly to 55 degrees C.

This card is very quiet running under decent load. The fan isn’t noticeable until you reach 60% fan speed. I love the solid construction and attention to detail. The price performance hit a perfect sweet spot for me.

This card can be run in dual and triple SLI mode.

Source: Daniel Lebryk from Amazon review

Buy this amazing graphics card!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.