XFX GTX260 Black Edition Review

This Black Edition video card from XFX comes pre-overclocked. That's a good thing for the folks who either don't know how to overclock or the people who just want something better than the normal cards. Manufacturers know this since the bulk of the market is not this crowd. Now you have the gamers, enthusiasts and hardcore benchmark junkies that will make the card scream for mercy. Overclocking abilities on the factory clock speeds are many times a good indicator that the card will do well when the cooling is improved and the voltage mods have been put into place. So how well does this card from XFX do on air? Pretty well actually. On the Core speed only the EVGA GTX260 FTW had a higher GPU core and shader clock speed. When you add in the additional processing cores, the performance of the XFX Black addition is almost as good as the well clocked GTX280 in the comparison list. I was able to coax an additional 76MHz out of the GPU core,111MHz more out of the memory and 121MHz more from the shader cores. Add the additional clock speeds to a card that is already almost as fast as the GTX280 and you have a lot of performance to play with. This translates into additional frames per second for the gamer, additional points per day for the people running distributed computing projects and last but not least, reduced time to compress video when using the GPU.