ASUS, EVGA, Zotac GeForce GTX 460 Cards Overclocked and Reviewed
by Ryan Smith on July 12, 2010 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NVIDIA
- GeForce GTX 460
- GPUs
Overclocked Power, Temperature, & Noise
For the Zotac and EVGA cards without voltage tweaking capabilities, the power consumption penalty for overclocking is very minor due to the fact that power consumption increases with voltage much faster than it does with frequency. For the stock-clocked Zotac this is an 18W-36W penalty, while the factory overclocked EVGA cards are even lower (thanks to binning) at just 9W. Meanwhile as expected the Asus card with its voltage tweaking capabilities ends up witnessing a larger jump in power consumption in return for its greater overclock capabilities: 70W under Furmark. This is nearly half of the card’s TDP, so this is a very notable difference.
With only a minor increase in power consumption, our non-voltmodded GTX 460s only experience a minor rise in temperature. The EVGA card only rises in temperature by a single degree, and even the Asus only rises to 72C under Furmark thanks to its more aggressive fan, leaving temperatures well in the safe range for these cards. Zotac card fares the worst here, most likely due to its partially blocked vent – here it reaches a more toasty 86C.
Last but not least we have the noise factor. Thanks to the very low increase in power consumption increase the EVGA and Zotac cards experience when overclocking, the coolers on these cards have to do very little to handle the extra heat. Here the amount of noise generated increased by less than 1.5dB for the already loud Zotac, and in the case of our EVGA cards didn’t increase at all. The Asus card is of course the exception to the rule here, once again due to a combination of the more aggressive cooler and voltage modification. Here the amount of noise generated shoots up by 4.4dB when overclocked, which is a fair trade for the overclock but is definitely going to be more noticeable than the rest of the cards in our collection.
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VIDYA - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
you can overclock them.......you can compute with them.......you can easily scale their performance by just adding another card........and dont have to worry about memory and stuffs. LET ME SAY THIS GPU's have over taken the CPU's in more than many ways.....i would advice intel to develop a better larabee.Lord 666 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
What gives Ryan? You have made your point clear (ad nauseum actually) about the several dollars differentiation between 768 and 1gb along with overclocking, but without a full picture of performance numbers, the review is still lacking.Is there still an NDA on the video performance and/or CUDA metrics as I noticed other sites do not have results either?
Pessimism - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
The future you envision is more dependent on NVIDIA deciding to change their business practices and eliminate:-Faulty drivers that slip through QA with bad fan control, cooking their products to death
-Poorly made chips that separate from their packaging with heat under normal operating conditions
-Lying to their customer base about the existance of problems with their products
-Refusing to give specific information to customers about exactly which products are defective
DominionSeraph - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I see ATI marketing is present and accounted for.Face it, Nvidia has a compelling product in the GTX 460. If it was priced $30 higher it would be nothing special. If it was 20% slower it would be nothing special. If it was a power hog like the GF100 it would be hard to recommend.
But it's none of those things. Nvidia managed to sneak a good product in. Their ONLY one.
Now maybe the 5850 will come back down to launch price ($259), or maybe even $249 which would bring its price/performance in line with the $229 GTX 460.
mrmojo1 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
"-Poorly made chips that separate from their packaging with heat under normal operating conditions"I have one of these in my ASUS g1s laptop. I had to have the MB replaced once already due to the nvidia GPU. Looks like it's gonna keep working until my warranty goes out in a month or two... fun stuff =/
mrmojo1 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
oh btw, I like both NVidia and ATI; i'm not an nvidia hater.Just a little pissed that a laptop I paid over $2000 for at the time was essentially defective from the start.
tick tock tick....
/rant
irsmurf - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
Anyone thinking of going for a GTX 480 would be wise to consider SLI 1GB GTX 460's. 2D surround and better than GTX 480 performance for only $440 - $57.20 CB = $382.80 at TigerDirect.It is much more quiet, much more cool, consumes much less power, costs much less, and provides superior performance... what more could you ask for? This is the most kick ass card since the 8800GT. 5970 is TWICE the price... and you don't get SLI's superior scaling.
irsmurf - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
I don't mean to say SLI GTX 460's will outperform the 5970.SantaAna12 - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
If the 5850 is the closest comp...then why no 5850CF benches?irsmurf - Monday, July 12, 2010 - link
$400 vs $620? Doesn't sound like competition to me.