GeForce GTX 260

Written by - on 06 November 2009. Posted in GeForce GT 200 Series

The GeForce GTX 260 is the junior model of the GT200. Immediately after the announcement of the latest NVIDIA GT200 GPU and related models based on it, only the GeForce GTX 280 video card appeared on sale. The younger GeForce GTX 260 model went on sale a little later, as planned. Perhaps NVIDIA was afraid of competition from the flagship from the younger card, or maybe there were not enough ready-made copies. It is said that in the production of the GT200 chip, rejection exceeds 50%, thereby making production even more expensive.

It's no secret that rejected copies of chips are installed in GeForce GTX 260 video cards, in which some of the functional blocks are disabled, which makes production as a whole more profitable. Thus, it is important for NVIDIA to produce more GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards in order to minimize losses from production defects. It can be seen that NVIDIA has followed the beaten path and the GeForce GTX 260 was obtained from the GeForce GTX 280 by removing some of the functional blocks.

Specifications NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260

Name	GeForce GTX 260
Core	GT200 (D10U-20)
Process technology (µm)	0.065
Transistors (million)	1400
Core frequency	576
Memory frequency (DDR)	999
Bus and memory type	GDDR3 448-bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	111.89
Unified shader blocks	192
Frequency of unified shader units	1242
TMU per conveyor	64
ROP	28
Shader Model	4.0
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	36864
DirectX	10
Interface	PCIe 2.0

The GeForce GTX 260 consumes less power than the GeForce GTX 280, so it has both 6-pin power connectors. In practice, this means wider compatibility with power supplies, both in terms of power and connectors. After all, 8-pin power connectors, like the GeForce GTX 280, have not yet become widespread. And finally, we note that the GeForce GTX 260 supports 3-way SLI technology, like its older sister. There is nothing surprising in this, because both video cards are based on exactly the same printed circuit boards, with the only difference being that the younger model, the GTX 260, lacks several memory chips.

Even without overclocking, the GeForce GTX 260 video card shows very high results and is second only to the more expensive GeForce GTX 280. If it is overclocked, the difference becomes even smaller, making this video card a good choice for gamers, but with the release of the new GeForce GTX 260 core 216, this purchase became impractical, since at the same price, the latter has more productivity.

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