GTX460 SLi overclocked, mated and put in context

GTX460: Vanilla, overclocked and mated

Why vanilla, overclocked and mated?  Well, you see, this card comes in a variety of flavours straight out of the gate. EVGA has delivered a 768MB version at standard clocks, an overclocked 768MB card and will also have a standard clocked 1GB card.

Given the expense of Fermi to date, KitGuru wanted to focus on the most affordable solution (to give the best possible buying advice to the <1% of you who might consider putting a second card in your machine).

Rough-n-Ready SLi Test Rig: Numbers were generated with an affordable system – with the kind of specification KitGuru believes likely for overclockers and upgraders. Intel Core i5 750 processor with 4GB of DDR3 1600MHz on an Asus P7P55D mainboard.

We’ve gone with Aliens Versus Predator for several reasons, including:-

1. It’s a brand new title
2. It uses DirectX 11
3. It uses tessellation
4. ATI’s developer relations team worked closely with the game’s writers, but nVidia has stressed to KitGuru on several occasions that we should test with it. nVidia's top spinners were that confident in the results

We’ll go through all of the intense testing and sideways comparisons at a later date (Zardon is busy torturing ‘oh so many cards' in his dungeon right now), but here’s the one graph that will tell you everything you need to know about HD resolution DX11 scaling and the EVGA GTX460 card:-

Comparing results across platforms is not smart and we'd normally not recommend that you do it. However, we did notice that the fine folks at Hexus have just put the new £1,200 Asus ROG Ares card through Aliens Vs Predator at 1920×1080 with 4xAA 16xAF and got 59.1 frames a second. Given that they used a full blown Core i7 965 with 6GB memory and an SSD, it seems that the figures for the EVGA GTX460 SLi ovreclocked set-up are pretty similar. Interesting. A pair of GTX460 cards can keep pace with the world's fastest graphics card? Very interesting.