ASUS ENGTX260 Matrix GeForce GTX 260 896MB Video Card Review

Installation

Test Rig:
Intel i7 920
Gigabyte EX58-UD4P X58 motherboard
OCZ Blade DDR3-2000 6GB Triple Channel Memory Kit
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Toxic VaporX Video Card (for comparison purposes)
OCZ EliteXStream 800 Watt PSU
Zalman CNPS 9900LED CPU Cooler
NZXT Tempest Extended Midtower
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

As always, installation is very simple, just pop the card into your primary PCI-E x 16 slot, connect the PCI-E power cables, connect the monitor, and install drivers. As this is a 10.5″ video card, I highly recommend measuring before purchase if installation is into a midtower.there are some mids that won’t accommodate a 10.5″ video card.

Asus video cards that use Gamer OSD will require installation of that utility to control the GPU cooler fans, so use of the driver disk is necessary. geForce drivers 181.20 are on the driver disk.

Lately, I have had some problems installing geForce drivers from the downloaded file, so if this is a new build or changing from an ATI card, I’d recommend using the driver disk and update later.

Just to mention, I already had the latest drivers installed on the rig, and Vista recognized the ENGTX260 immediately, didn’t even require a reboot, though I did have to reboot for Gamer OSD.


ASUS ENGTX260 Matrix GeForce GTX 260 896MB Video Card ASUS ENGTX260 Matrix GeForce GTX 260 896MB Video Card

Overclocking

I used iTracker for overclocking the Asus ENGTX260 Matrix. To keep it simple, I used a User Defined Profile. After bumping up the GPU voltage a little, I got a very stable 688mHz overclock. I bumped the shader clock up to 1376 and the memory up to 2026 just for good measure. The Matrix was far from done overclocking, but I was very happy with a 20% overclock.


ASUS ENGTX260 Matrix GeForce GTX 260 896MB Video Card

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