stevenwright6379
New member
Introduction
Now if you cast your minds back to the previous generation of NVidia cards (GTX200 series) you would remember that the GTX260 was an awesome card. You could overclock it like there’s no tomorrow and it would offer a very nice performance boost when gaming. I am now going to find out if the GTX460 can live up to the same expectations.
When choosing a new graphics card you have to consider the wide range of manufactures offering a whole range of cards with reference coolers or non-reference coolers, reference PCBs or non-reference PCBs, overclocked or stock clocked. Now with some of these features the manufacture in question will offer a premium over other cards that don’t have such advantages. ASUS on the other hand have taken it one step further by offering a non-reference cooler, non-reference PCB and overclocked card cheaper than all the other manufactures offering the opposite (usually cheaper).
Naturally I had to check this out as it sounded too good to be true. I also took it one step further and got 2 so I can test them in a 2-way SLI configuration.
Specifications
- Core Clock: 700MHz
- Memory Clock: 3680MHz (Effective)
- Shader Clock: 1400MHz
- Processing Cores: 336
- Bus Type: PCI-E 2.0
- Memory Detail: 768MB GDDR5
- Memory Bit Width: 192 Bit
- Memory Speed: 0.5 ns
- Memory Bandwidth: 86.4 GB/sec
- One Mini-HDMI 1.4a Connector
- Two Dual-Link DVI-I Connectors
Packaging
ASUS is well known for providing outstanding packaging which offers added assurance that the card will arrive in one piece even if the courier plays football with it. Yet again ASUS does not disappoint. The front of the box is perfect you have the right amount of information about the card as well as a stunning picture of a man, angel and tiger all in one.
The back of the box is the usual mass of text telling you the features in many different languages.
When you open that box you then get to the accessories and obviously the card nicely organised in to compartments. In the tube like compartment you will find a VGA-DVI adaptor, a HDMI-DVI adaptor and 2 Molex to 1 6pin PCI-E adaptor.
In the smaller box you will find a VGA driver & manual disk, ASUS speed step quick installation guide in multiple languages and a nice leather CD wallet with the ASUS logo on the front of it.
We then get to the card itself. Where as you can see not only is there 2 cards there is an 80mm fan cooling the card. I personally would have preferred a 92mm fan for added quietness. You also see the 2 8mm cooper heat pipes to help dissipate the heat away from the card.
On the back of the card you see the single SLI bridge connector showing it only supports a max of 2-way SLI. But that is not all you see on the back of the card, you will also see a back plate for the heat sink cooling the power regulations. You will also be greeted with 2 6pin power connectors to help power card.
On the rear of the card you see a full slot for ventilation as well as display connectors which include 2 DVI-I ports and a mini-HDMI port.
As for the cooler, you soon learn why it is called the Direct Cu (copper) cooler. The copper heat pipes have direct contact to the GF104 chip powering the card allowing for better cooling.
No review is complete without a picture of the PCB without the cooler attached and here it is.
Test setup
I7 920 @4.0GHz
6GB Kingston Hyper-X T1
GIGABYTE X58A-UD7
Corsair AX750w
Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit
Prolimatech Megahalems with arctic cooling MX-3
2x ASUS ENGTX460 top 768Mb in SLI (using 260.99 drivers)
In this test I will be testing one card on its own as well as in SLI and will also be overclocking the cards in both configurations to help provide an insight at what configuration is best for you.
Overclocking and temperatures
This card comes with a factory overclock of 25MHz but that never stopped me trying to get the core clock even higher. With a minor adjustment to the volts I managed to get the core clock to 850MHz, sadly thermal limitations when in SLI prevented me from clocking the cards any higher.
I was very impressed with the direct Cu cooler until I overclocked the cards when in SLI the top card reached a nice and toasty 99C with the fans at 100% and the bottom card was 74C.
3Dmark vantage
(Please note the purpose of this test the performance pre-set mode was used.)
Now if these results haven’t impressed you then I don’t know what will. Mainly the results from the SLI with the overclock enabled. It scored a massive P30867 even its bigger brother card the GTX480 doesn’t touch that.
Unigine
No set of benchmarks for a direct X 11 graphics card will be complete without the Unigine heaven 2.1 benchmark. For this I tested it tessellation set to extreme and AA was switched off.
Again the results were very impressive with quite a nice boost even doubled the performance in some cases. But do we see the same benefits when gaming
Resident evil 5 benchmark
Resident evil 5 depends heavily on the graphics cards used. In earlier tests we found that overclocking the CPU made little to no difference in the score so I felt this was a perfect game to use to test the benefits from overclocking the card and the results speak for themselves.
Crysis warhead
This is what many believe is the most graphically demanding game to be made to date. Now as I am sure you all know cryENGINE 2 isn’t known for good optimisation and for that reason it was tested with AA turned off but still got very respectable scores until in SLI where the average frame rate was so close it’s not worth the extra heat from overclocking.
Metro 2033
Currently the biggest resource hog there is. Metro 2033 is the Crysis of this Generation of gaming and has seen the likes of the GTX480 and HD5970 struggle to keep it at steady frame rates. So it is not surprising to see the GTX460s find it near on impossible to keep it under control until they double teamed the game in SLI.
Conclusion
So looking at them results we can see the GTX 460 is an outstanding card that will happily get in a fight with any game you throw at it and show it whose boss but in today’s world cooling is important.
ASUS have done a good job with this cooler for single card use but in SLI with the cards right next to each other in terms of noise the reference design wins that round. Also the use of a non-reference PCB also limits your cooling options. So if you are planning on water cooling I wouldn’t choose a different card.
As for price ASUS have won that round as these cards can be had for around £10 cheaper than a fully reference designed model, making it terrific value for money.
Overall I would have to say of you are looking for a single card then this is a perfect card to use but if you are looking for cards to be used in SLI then look elsewhere.
Pros-
Good for single card use
Good value for money
Cons-
Non-reference PCB
Loud when in SLI
