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
Final Words
Wrapping up our look at vendor cards for today's GeForce GTX 460 launch, we’ll start with what’s probably the weakest card from the launch, the Zotac GTX 460 1GB.
The Zotac card is both a bit bold and a bit conservative in its design, and frankly we’re not quite sure why it didn’t work out. Zotac effectively attempted to emulate the Radeon 5850’s cooling setup on a GTX 460 card, and given their similar TDP it should have worked. This design should be more than adequate to quietly cool a card like the GTX 460 1GB, but instead we ended up with something that’s much hotter and much louder than any of the other GTX 460 designs we’ve seen today.
We’re big fans of the Radeon 5800 layout, as it affords good cooling without compromising on the port selection. While everyone else is offering only DVI and HDMI ports, Zotac is offering DisplayPort along with everything else, which moving forward we believe to be a good idea. We’d like to see this port configuration on future GTX 460 cards, but first it looks like Zotac needs to go back and work out the quirks of their design.
Next we have EVGA’s GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked, which unlike the other cards in our roundup doesn’t deviate from NVIDIA’s reference design at all. In this case this is a very reasonable choice, as the reference GTX 460 design offers great cooling and low noise in a compact package. For a $20 premium over a reference card EVGA offers a solid factory overclock, excellent overclocking software, and a lifetime warranty, a tantalizing collection that’s spoiled by the existence of the 1GB GTX 460.
As we discussed in the conclusion of Part 1 of our review, the 1GB GTX 460 makes much more sense than the 768MB GTX 460 due to the higher performance and greater degree of futureproofness. This is further compounded in the case of the EVGA SuperClocked card, as that’s now a $10 price gap. The factory overclock alone isn’t enough to close the gap, and there’s no guarantee a SuperClocked card is any more likely to overclock well than a normal card. The EVGA SuperClocked is a fine card, but when EVGA also will be selling a 1GB card with the same excellent overclocking tools it’s hard to suggest the slower card for only $10 in savings. In this light we would recommend an EVGA 1GB card over the 768MB SuperClocked, otherwise between this and the Asus card this is the 768MB card to get for casual overclockers who are not ready to take a dive in to voltage tweaking.
Finally we have Asus’s entry, the only fully-custom card in our roundup. Asus takes the extreme overclocking angle and makes a solid delivery; with our sample achieving a 38% core overclock over a stock clocked GTX 460. At a premium of only $10 (and some noise) over a reference card this is clearly the overclocking card to get for well-versed enthusiasts who are willing to take the risks of voltage tweaking. But even Asus eventually runs in to the same problem EVGA does: overclocking just puts you in competition with slightly more expensive 1GB cards. Ultimately this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s something that needs to be taken in to consideration.
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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.