Source: Tom's Hardware UK – Keywords: geforce, core, 216
Categories: Graphics
Benchmark Results: First Person Shooters
At $2,500, $1,250, and $625, our System Builder Marathon machines were designed to game at 1920x1200, 1680x1050, and 1280x1024 resolutions. Even though we didn’t build for the 30” display market, we still tested our $2,500 3-way SLI configuration at 2560x1600 pixels to compare it against a former SBM system. The 2560x1600 results have been carried over into today’s 3-way GTX 260 versus 2-way GTX 280 SBM update.
Our 3-way SLI configuration wouldn’t even run Crysis at 2560x1600 pixels with very high settings and AA enabled, but the 2-way GTX 280’s does it so slowly that the results at this high setting are meaningless. At resolutions up to 1920x1200, the 3-way GTX 260’s show remarkably improved performance. (Ed.: If you remember back to our GeForce GTX 295 Preview, the same Crysis problem plagued that card as well--Nvidia has confirmed that this is a driver issue and not some artifact of running a trio of GTX 260s, as we've seen suggested).
Two GTX 280s beat three Core 216 GTX 260s in UT3, but both solutions are so fast that the game doesn’t even need SLI to be playable at its highest settings.
- Previous page Test Settings
- Next page Benchmark Results: Real-Time Strategy
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It just goes to show how quickly things move along, and goes to support my personal mantra of "if you're prepared to pay for it, then get it when you want it". You simply cannot hang about now waiting for significant price drops or the next big thing because it all moves along too quickly.
are these better than my gforce 2 mx440?
nice article, but ca you please be consistent with the colours on the graphs, sometimes the 260's are blues sometimes the 280's are blue, this changed on the same page. We can see which bar is biggest we don't need 'blue is best' style colour coding as well.
All looks so very nice! I now have to find out if it is worth it to upgarde to these or wait? I have 2 BFG8800 GTs, perhaps I should wait for the next gen. of cards to come out. I just hope that my 1000 watt power supply will be good enough for the next gen. of cards?!?!
1000 watt is sure enough! You could run two GTX280 cards with that. With the smaller manufacturing processes coming up, graphic cards shouldn't get more power thirsty in the future then the current top line. The GTX280 and 260 are the most power hungry cards in history. It's redicilous actually how much power these things require.
If I were you, I would wait. The 8800GT is still a decent card, and with two of them, you still can run almost every game to the max. I don't know what your processor is, probably an E8400 or a Q6600. With those processors (especially the Q6600), anything faster then two 8800GT cards will be overkill. Your processor will be a bottleneck. Only with the really fast i7 systems it makes sense to put in two cards. You can even see in these benchmarks that the i7 processor here bottlenecks 3 GTX260 cards. I would only put that much graphics power in the i7 extreme processor, and then still it would probably be a bottleneck. These graphics cards are redicilously powerful on their own. There isn't a processor out there yet which can keep up with 3 GTX280, or even GTX260 cards.
i've got a Q6600 on a G33 board with 4Gb DDR800 @ 1066
GFX card is an aging 7950GT (quadro 3500) and its getting choppy running current games at 2560x1024.
what single card can i upgrade to to push that and 3840x1024 happily?
i know the Q6600 is going to be a bottleneck etc, but i'm not going to upgrade till i7 gets down to mainstream, so 260? 280? 285? and has anyone got a massive passive cooling solution for the 200 series?
Forget about all the benchmark crap! Go buy a good card or 2 or 3 and put them in your rig. If you have a great picture and graphics at whatever resolutions you play, then that's all that matters!!!