eVGA GTX460 FTW Review (versus Reference HD5870)

Rating: 9.0.

We have reviewed many GTX460's on KitGuru over the last month and we are confident that this nVidia product is quite possibly the best value for money gaming card on the market today, bar none. It has won our highest awards, and deservedly so.

We have already compared the GTX460's against 5850's, 5830's and even older nVidia cards, but today we want to look at it in a completely different context. eVGA were kind enough to supply us with their GTX460 FTW Edition, a card which is supplied at the highest possible ‘out of the box' clocks – 850mhz on the core and 1000mhz (4000mhz effective) on the memory.

What would the outcome be if we compared this card against the market leading HD5870 at £300 inc vat – around £100 more than the eVGA GTX460 FTW, which is on sale now for £200 inc vat? Is this an unfair pairing for eVGA? or can this little powerhouse possibly hang onto the HD5870 when it comes to outright gaming performance levels?

This is what we plan on finding out today … so hold onto your shirt tails, this is going to get messy.

The GTX460 FTW is supplied in the stereotypical eVGA box design – no dragons or semi naked ladies here, just the name of the product and the company. We like it.

The bundle is well balanced… there is a software CD, literature on the product, vga converter and a mini HDMI to HDMI cable, always a great addition. eVGA also bundle an ‘eVga GTX400 GPU's' sticker with this card, which is rather unusual.

The card itself is shipped in an antistatic bag, protected within a cardboard shell. It is a very understated card, but we like the eVGA designs, they always look as if they mean business.

The fan is an 11 blade inverted design and if you look closely you can see copper heatpipes.

After removing the cooler and cleaning off the thermal paste we can get a closer look at the heatsink. It is a copper/aluminum hybrid design with a dual heatpipe connecting directly to the core.

The eVGA GTX460 FTW has two dual link DVI connectors and a mini HDMI connector. As mentioned earlier eVGA also supply a very high quality mini HDMI to HDMI converter cable. As expected, the card follows the reference design, requiring two 6 pin power connectors.

This card is supplied in a highly overclocked state, running at 850mhz on the core and 1000mhz (4000mhz effective) on the GDDR5 memory. A reference GTX460 operates at 675mhz on the core and 900mhz (3600mhz effective) on the memory. We have looked at these cards many times before so we won't bore you again with a detailed analysis of the hardware.

For the review today we have built a strong system which we feel would fit in well with the audience purchasing either of these cards. We are using a Core i7 950 Quad Core CPU with 6GB of DDR3 memory. We have applied a moderate overclock to the processor because we know you guys never run anything at reference speeds!

We are also going to limit testing to 1920×1080 (1080) and 1920×1200 as less than 1% of the enthusiast user base reading this will have a 30 inch screen – this will address the widest possible audience.

Test System: Validation here.

eVGA GTX460 FTW 1GB

Head to Head:
Reference HD5870

Other Hardware:
Processor: Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.6ghz
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Motherboard: ASRock X58 Extreme 6
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz 6GB (3x2GB)
Power Supply: Thermaltake 750W Toughpower Grand
Chassis: Cooler Master CM 690 II
Monitor: Dell Ultrasharp U2410 (A00)

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Stone Giant
3DMark Vantage
HQV Benchmark
Catalyst 10.9 Driver
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Forceware 260.89 beta

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Resident Evil 5
Lost Planet 2
Far Cry 2
Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.
Metro 2033
Alien V Predator

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Our minimum frame rate game graphs have three main zones. These are sampled over a specific 30 interval period of time and then mapped into a chart. These are handy reference guides to detail worst case performance of the product being reviewed. When we test video cards we try to find the best combination of resolution and image quality settings while still maintaining playable frame rates.

Over 30fps is the zone most people want at all times, this means perfectly smooth frame rates with no hitching.

Between 30fps and 25fps is the KitGuru ‘Playable’ zone, although some people might notice occasional stuttering in specific scenes.

Under 25fps is classed as the KitGuru ‘Danger Zone’ which means that the game experience will be less than impressive. Settings and/or resolution would need lowered to help smooth out the frame rate.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

1080p is a standard resolution we use with the Heaven Benchmark on all graphics cards, this means all review results are comparible throughout previous months.

Shaders are set to high, Tessellation to normal, anistrophy to 4 and Anti Aliasing is disabled.

The eVGA card scores around 4fps higher in average frame rates, however it is worth noting that the minimum fps is around half a frame less than the AMD solution. Overall, however this is a win however for the eVGA card.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

This is a really close battle between the eVGA GTX460 FTW and the HD5870. The HD5870 just edges it by around 400 points in the overall score. We can see that Feature Test 5 is 30 fps higher on the GTX460 card while the HD5870 swings it back with Feature Test 6 scoring 168 fps compared to 71 fps. We don't really value the importance of synthetic benchmarks at KitGuru, but they can be interesting additions to an overall product viewpoint.

Stone Giant is a 3rd party Direct X 11 benchmark developed by BitSquid and FatShark to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive tessellation in a game setting. BitSquid is a start up formed in 2009 from the lead engineers at GRIN, who were the developers of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (and others). Their publisher, FatShark, is based in Sweden and recently released ‘Lead and Gold” on Steam.

This benchmark uses tessellation extensively and DirectCompute to render high quality depth of field with soft bokeh.

We run this benchmark at 1920×1080 today with tessellation set to high. Aspect ratio is automatic and window mode is disabled.

Fermi hardware is a very powerful design for tessellation performance as we can see with the Stone Giant benchmark results. This isn't even a close battle, the eVGA card walks home with a victory.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

The latest nVidia drivers have upped the image quality and AMD are still having issues with the Transition to 2:2 lock. This test failure alone on the AMD side means that the eVGA GTX460 scores 195 points compared to 193 points for the HD5870. We are glad to see that the Stadium 2:2 test and the Luminance Frequency Bands test are a pass with the eVGA board – because the recent Zotac GT430 failed both these tests.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

This is a close run battle again with the massive overclocks helping the eVGA 460 FTW to trail the HD5870 by only 7-9 fps throughout the testing section.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Our settings: 1920×1200 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(4x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Optimal), Vegetation(High), Shading(High), Terrain(High), Geometry(High), Post FX(High), Texture(High), Shadow(High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

The eVGA GTX460 FTW absolutely dominates with this game as we would have expected beforehand. This engine has always favoured nVidia hardware and the differences are clearly noted above.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We are testing in DX11 mode.

Lost Planet 2 is brand new game which incorporates DX11 technology. We test with this enabled and as we can see the eVGA GTX460 FTW is outperforming the HD5870 by around 8-10fps throughout most of the environment test sections. We think (and hope) AMD can improve this performance with driver updates.

Tom Clancy HAWX is set in the same universe as Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; as Captain Scott Mitchell, the Ghost leader, is featured in a few missions of the missions. Plot elements are carried over from other Tom Clancy games such as the missile defense system found in Tom Clancy’s EndWar. G4′s interview with H.A.W.X’s lead designer Thomas Simon reveals that the game takes place in between Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and Tom Clancy’s EndWar.

The player begins the game in 2014 as the player assumes the role of former U.S. Air Force pilot, David Crenshaw, who is part of an elite unit called H.A.W.X (“High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”), provides fire-support missions for the Ghost team carrying out covert operations in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. However, shortly after the mission, the Air Force decides to deactivate the H.A.W.X squadron and its pilots, including Crenshaw, are recruited into the PMC Artemis Global Security.

We are testing : DX 10.1 with shadows high, sun shafts high, ambient occlusion (SSAO) very high. view distance high, forest high, environment high, texture quality high, HDR on, Engine heat on and DOF on.

The average frame rates are the same throughout our test environments however the minimum frame rate of the eVGA GTX460 drops more dramatically in certain situations, such as when heavy smoke pollutes the screen. It isn't noticeable under ‘real world' gaming situations, but our FRAPS testing recorded the differences.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

The AMD HD5870 is able to deliver around 7-10 extra frames per second throughout most of our Alien V Predator testing. Clearly the hardware and drivers are more suited to this particular engine than the nVidia solution.

The makers of Metro 2033 – 4A Games was founded by people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, in particular Oles’ Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice to “make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.

We tested at 1920×1080 with settings on default ‘normal'

This is a close run result with the eVGA averaging a couple of frames less per second over the course of the testing. There were a few instances when the minimum rates jumped a little higher, but generally the nVidia hardware was outperformed, but only slightly.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

It isn't often we see a Fermi product draining less power than AMD hardware, but considering the GTX460 is a mid/high range board and the HD5870 is AMD's single core flagship it is understandable. When gaming, the reduction is only around 5 watts, but under Furmark load this increases to 31 watts. Not a huge reduction, but clearly noticeable.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. These results are taken with the system built inside the Cooler Master CM 690 II which offers great airflow.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test.

Both cards peak under 80c which is a solid figure to achieve. The GTX460 FTW runs between 3c and 7c degrees cooler than the reference HD5870 board, even in its massively overclocked state.

Return to ambient is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time (less), the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

The copper heatpipe cooler design helps to ensure the card returns to under 50c in 8 seconds, which is reasonably quick considering the drop from 76c initially. It takes a further 9 seconds to return to the idle state. A total of 17 seconds is not bad especially considering the massive overclocks on the card.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20 dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The cooler is not noticeable when under normal conditions, it is only under extended full load with Furmark that the fan increases to keep the core within parameters. We recorded under 35dBa when gaming but 36.8dBA after running Furmark for extended periods. The card is not really any louder than a reference GTX460.

Today we used eVGA's Precision software for the overclocking results.

We managed to get another 70mhz from the core and 50mhz (200mhz effective) from the memory before artifacting occurred. Considering the already high overclocks placed on the card this is really impressive.

To see how the overclocks helped with the performance we gave Metro 2033 another run.

After manual overclocking we were able to get the eVGA GTX460 on equal footing with the HD5870 in Metro 2033. Quite the result.

The GTX460 has always impressed KitGuru, it has walked away with several of our ‘Must Have' awards in recent months. The eVGA GTX460 FTW is pretty much the pinnacle of GTX460 engineering, not only can it keep up with the HD5870, but it runs cooler, requires less power and doesn't make a racket in the process.

Let us look at the results from our testing today:

When we look at the results the eVGA GTX460 FTW has the edge with the Tessellation heavy Unigine Heaven and Stone Giant Benchmarks. It was almost neck and neck in 3dMark Vantage, but the HD5870 took the lead by a few hundred points thanks to a stonking result in Feature Test 6.

The games were a pretty mixed bag, nVidia favourites such as Far Cry 2 ran significantly faster on the GTX460 FTW while AMD friendly titles such as Resident Evil 5 switched the lead. Tom Clancy HAWX was pretty much neck and neck, with the HD5870 delivering higher minimum frame rates for a slightly smoother experience in the intensive sections. We were however quite surprised to see such a huge lead for nVidia with the DX11 based Lost Planet 2, it was not only noticeable in the results tables, but it felt far superior when actually playing it. Clearly AMD have some work ahead of them on a driver level with this game.

So the outcome is pretty much split down the line, however we need to look at the current pricing of both cards. The eVGA GTX460 FTW (which means ‘for the win' by the way in case you are still wondering) is around £200 inc vat in the UK (if you can find it in stock anywhere) whereas a basic HD5870 is still around £300. After a bit of searching we did find an XFX reference card for £280.99 inc vat which is a very good price – that is a £60 price drop from earlier in the year.

Right now, if you want a powerful gaming card, the GTX460 is a fantastic product which always hits the top of our shortlist. There are certainly cheaper versions than the eVGA  ‘FTW' version we tested today, but just remember that while most GTX460's overclock really well, you might not hit these heights. Every card will overclock to different thresholds – eVGA do handpick these cards so they are guaranteed to hit the best speeds. If you can't find the ‘FTW' model in your area, then be sure to check out the ‘Superclocked' version which we are sure can be pushed quite close – its only £180 inc vat.

KitGuru says: The GTX460 in a highly overclocked state is not only a challenger for the mighty HD5870 but the eVGA is one of the finest cards available on the market today. The only downside for nVidia is that there is absolutely no need to aim higher in the Fermi range … unless breaking benchmarks or running the most demanding engines at 1600p is top of your list.

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