OC cards reviewed: Introduction
Ex factory overclocked graphics card have always been popular. After all you as the customer get more performance without losing the warranty and you don't have to find stable frequencies yourself. Many users think this to be more important than losing the warranty to get the very last bit of power out of a card.

Therefore we decided to take a closer look at a E-VGA OC card, the Geforce GTX 260-216 SSC, and a Gainward device, the HD 4870 Golden Sample with 1,024 MiByte. As you have noticed probably, we aren't the only ones who came up with this idea. For some days all around the world articles have been published that feature the Geforce cad mentioned above. The reason for this is a concentrated Nvidia campaign: The combination of overclocked Evga card and the new Geforce 180.47 driver - which had been available to the press only - was supposed to give AMD's Radeon cards the creeps. For our review we use the officially WHQL certified drivers Geforce 180.48 and Catalyst 8.11.

To keep the equality of opportunities secured, we don't only check Gainward's Radeon HD 4870 Golden Sample against the noticeably more expensive Evga Geforce GTX 260-216 SSC, but also test the default designs which are close together in matter of prices.