The chaps over at Digit-Life take a further look at the GeForce GTX 260 with 216 Stream Processors. Here's an excerpt:

On the whole, overclocked GTX 260 cards with 216 stream processors catch up with the GTX280 in a number of tests. So users will again have to painfully choose what to buy. Why cannot NVIDIA make products for crystal-clear price segments that wouldn't overlap? As for me, I don't understand how this is possible in a company with several thousand employees and at least a hundred marketing specialists. Where is their common sense? Aren't they learning from their experience? Or perhaps NVIDIA decided AMD wasn't a worthy rival and decided to rest on its laurels. But now that AMD has launched very good products, NVIDIA is desperately trying to outrun the suddenly resurrected competitor by cutting prices.

As for our main conclusion, the new GTX 260 is a brilliant card. If it costs the same as its previous modification (192sp), it's the best choice. In this case I speak for users, no matter how much it costs manufacturers. But the fact remains, the new GTX 260 card currently outscores its competitor (RADEON 4870 512MB). When this review was written we hadn't yet tested RADEON 4870 1GB, so we could only use the data we had.