Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB Graphics Card Review

Power consumption of the Galaxy GTX 260+ card is right on par with the other GeForce GTX 260 though it does have a slightly higher idle power consumption at 167 watts (total system power) compared to 157 watts.  It is able to run at a nearly 50 watt advantage on the GTX 280 though and is able to put out a comparable performance in many instances which is impressive. 

Performance

The new KFA2 Galaxy GTX 260+ is showing itself to be formidable contender in the mainstream performance graphics market.  By using the new, upgraded GTX 260+ (aka GTX 270, etc) GPU the KFA2 brand is able to take that a bit further by pushing up the clock rates of the core, shaders and memory by about 13% producing a much faster than stock graphics card.  In my testing the Galaxy card was able to beat out the highly overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 260 FTW card and was ALMOST on par with the BFG GTX 280 1GB card in many cases. 

Both Bioshock and World in Conflict were very playable on this card with top quality settings at 2560×1600 resolutions – obviously this GPU will have the power to max out most users display configurations before the GPU becomes a bottleneck.  That might not be the case going forward of course, as we have to look to games like Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and others that will be included in future reviews and might be much more stressful on current GPUs.  We will have to wait for that, but in either event, the Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ will offer top of the line gaming performance today, for a reasonable price, and likely will continue to bring you solid gaming performance for years to come.


Features and Extras

We should note that there are a couple of bonuses you get with the GTX 260+, and all NVIDIA GTX 200 series GPUs.  NVIDIA has made it a point to push their PhysX technology and their CUDA-enabled applications like Badaboom that allows for GPU-based video transcoding at an enormous performance gain over traditional CPU transcoding.  You can see our take on NVIDIA’s move away from “just” a GPU in this article.

Pricing and Availability

One of Galaxy’s KFA2 graphics card series’ best selling points is its price – you can current kind the GeForce GTX 260+ model tested here for $335 on our pricing engine or $325 after a mail-in rebate on Newegg.com.  Obviously this means you can buy the card today – another big plus.  If you aren’t interested in an overclocked model, or are comfortable doing the overclocking yourself you can grab the stock version from Galaxy KFA2 for $285 and save some cash. 

Considering that you will be paying about $100 more for a bone-stock GeForce GTX 280 card the GTX 260 and GTX 260+ are looking like a better and better deal in the performance graphics market. 

Final Thoughts

The Galaxy KFA2 GeForce GTX 260+ is an impressively fast graphics card that will offer up more gaming performance than most users will need for today’s titles while staying in the $300-ish price range depending on your choice of stock or overclocked.