In the conclusion of our coverage of the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 launch, we posted this statement, "...dare we say a $300 graphics card represents an excellent value, from a price point perspective? These cards are definitely going to put significant price pressure on NVIDIA's GTX 200 series." At the time, the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 were selling for upwards of $650 and $400 respectively, and ATI's newly released Radeon, which performed somewhat better than the GTX 260, was introduced at "only" $299.

Of course, NVIDIA quickly responded with a hefty round of price cuts that brought the GTX 280's price down considerably and put the GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 on roughly equal footing, but it turns out NVIDIA wasn't quite done. Today NVIDIA is introducing an updated GeForce GTX 260 card with more stream processors and texture filtering units than its predecessor. The name of the new GPU is the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, due to the GPU's allotment of 216 stream processors--up from 192 in the first-gen GeForce GTX 260. We've got a couple of the new GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 cards in-house from EVGA and Zotac, and took them for a spin. Come on by the site and check them out...