GeForce GTX 460 Roundup Part 3 - Trio of Extremities

Test Setup

Test Setup

To test the three cards, we’ll be using our Intel X58 setup which has the following specifications:

• Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
• 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
• Windows 7 Ultimate

Clock speeds are usually a good indication of a card’s performance and we are expecting these cards to be substantially faster than a reference GeForce GTX 460. The Gigabyte and Zotac cards’ clock speeds are very comparable and so they should be performing very similarly. The Sparkle card with its lower clock speeds will be at a slight disadvantage here. In terms of comparisons, we'll be throwing in some of the previously reviewed cards, but not all as the list and comparisons could grow too long.

Raw performance aside, we are also interested to find out how effective their coolers would be. The aftermarket Accelero Twin Turbo Pro cooler from Arctic Cooling has proved to be very effective in the past and it’ll be intriguing to see how it’ll match up against the more compact Windforce 2x cooler from Gigabyte.

Here’s a quick summary of the cards’ clock speeds:

The full list of cards tested and driver versions used:

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 Super Overclock (ForceWare 258.96)
• Sparkle Calibre X460G (ForceWare 258.96)
• Zotac GeForce GTX 460 AMP! Edition (ForceWare 258.96)
• MSI N460GTX Hawk (ForceWare 258.96)
• Palit GeForce GTX 460 Sonic Platinum (ForceWare 258.96)
• Galaxy GeForce GTX 460 Super OC (ForceWare 258.96)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
• AMD Radeon HD 6850 (Catalyst 10.10)

The full list of benchmarks used:

• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
• Crysis Warhead
• Far Cry 2
• Warhammer: Dawn of War 2
• Battlefield Bad Company 2
• “Heaven" from Unigine v2.1
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat