eVGA GTX 460 768MB Superclocked Review

1. Introduction2. eVGA GTX 460 768MB Superclocked3. Testing Methodology4. UniGine Heaven Benchmark5. 3DMark Vantage6. Alien V Predator7. Far Cry 28. Resident Evil 59. Metro 203310. Tom Clancy HAWX11. Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC12. Left 4 Dead 213. Crysis Warhead14. HQV Benchmark V2.015. Overclocking16. Thermal Dynamics17. Acoustics18. Power Consumption19. Conclusion20. View All Pages

GTX460 is ‘Fermi done right' That's what nVidia wants us to believe after a tough year. On Wednesday 30th September 2009, Jen Hsun Huang stood on a global stage with a ‘Fermi card' in his hand and the watching world was treated to a series of demonstrations. Subsequently, we were told by nVidia that while the card itself was a mock-up, the demos had been generated on Fermi. Given that the vast majority of users will never spend more than £200 on a card, nVidia has been desperately looking forward to launching a competitive Fermi product into the ‘affordable price space'. KitGuru pulls out the spanner and oscilloscope to see if GTX460 delivers.

Today we see the release of the GTX 460, the baby brother in the Fermi series. nVidia says that it consumes less power, generates less heat and has been priced to tackle the HD5830. They are targeting the only card in the 5 series range which (KitGuru feels) is underpowered and overpriced. From the results we've seen in the KitGuru Labs, nVidia can afford to be a bit more confident than that. Quite a bit more.

The GTX 460 is going to hit the UK market at £175 inc vat, a very sweet spot indeed for gamers who still want a viable partner for their swanky 24 inch screen, without having spending a small fortune. We will be having a look at performance from this reference card.

Today however KitGuru is going to be focusing on the eVGA GTX 460 Superclocked Edition which is being released at around £195 inc vat and comes with a hefty overclock on the core (88mhz) and 50mhz (200mhz effective) on the memory.

Here is the current lineup from nVidia with the eVGA Superclocked card included in the mix.

Model	Geforce GTX 460 768MB	eVGA GTX 460 Superclocked 768MB	Geforce GTX 465	Geforce GTX 470	Geforce GTX 480
Graphics Processing Clusters	2	2	3	4	4
Streaming Multiprocessors	7	7	11	14	15
CUDA Cores	336	336	352	448	480
Texture Units	56	56	44	56	50
ROP Units	24	24	32	40	48
Graphics Clock (Fixed Function Units)	675mhz	763mhz	607mhz	607mhz	700mhz
Processor Clock (CUDA Cores)	1350mhz	1526mhz	1215mhz	1215mhz	1401mhz
Memory Clock (Clock Rate/Data Rate)	900mhz/3600mhz	950mhz/3800mhz	802mhz/3206mhz	837mhz/3348 mhz	924 mhz/3696mhz
Total Video Memory	768MB	768MB	1024MB	1280MB	1536MB
Memory Interface	192-bit	192-bit	256-bit	320-bit	384-bit
Total Memory Bandwidth	86.4GB/s	91.2GB/s	102.6 GB/s	133.9 GB/s	177.4 GB/s
Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear)	37.8 Gigatexels/sec	37.8 Gigatexels/sec	26.7 Gigatexels/sec	34.0 GigaTexels/sec	42.0 GigaTexels/sec
Fabrication process	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm	40nm
Connectors	2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI	2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI	2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI	2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI	2x Dual Link DVI-I1x Mini HDMI
Form Factor	Dual Slot	Dual Slot	Dual Slot	Dual Slot	Dual Slot
Power Connectors	2x6pin	2x6pin	2x6pin	2x6pin	1x6pin, 1x8pin
Recommended Power Supply	450 watts	450 watts	550 watts	550 watts	650 watts
Thermal Design Power	150 watts	150 watts	200 watts	215 watts	250 watts
Thermal Threshold	104c	104c	105c	105c	105c

The eVGA GTX 460 Superclocked card is supplied in a well designed, understated box. There is little information on the front apart from the model number and onboard memory amount. It is worth pointing out that in a few weeks nVidia will be releasing a 1GB version of the board which is slightly more expensive and is paired with a 256 bit bus for higher memory bandwidth (115.2 GB/s). It will also have 32 ROP units, not 24 as on the model we are reviewing today. According to nVidia it will also consume  slightly more power (nVidia quote 160 watts compared to 150 watts). Both cards are SLI capable, but be aware that there is a single SLi connector – so you can't daisy-chain more cards for more performance.

The back of the box contains a lot of generalised information on the hardware in various languages.

After removing the outer shell we are presented with an unusual egg crate shaped protective box (yep – you guessed it – this is the unusual egg laying contraption we've been running a competition on!). On the back is the manual, a driver disc and a mini HDMI to HDMI converter cable which is an extremely useful product to include. The Geforce GTX460 features enhanced audio support over HDMI, including bitstreaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The manual is a handy little reference guide for the product which details instructions on how to fit the card. The disc contains a driver which has already been superseeded by a new driver from nVidia.

The card is very plainly designed and the first thing that we noticed was just how small it was. The fan is an 11 blade design which apparently spins a lot slower than the versions on the higher end Fermi cards, we will analyse noise later. Two copper heatpipes are paired with an extruded aluminum core to draw heat from the processor.

We took a shot of the GTX 460 next to a HD5870 and a Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition for comparison purposes. The GTX 480 for instance is 10.5 inches long and the GTX 460 is only 8.25 inches. It is quite a compact card.

We like the black PCB and above you can see the rear of the card as well as the cooler mounting backplate.

The GTX460 requires two 6 pin power cables and the maximum power consumption is said to be in the region of 150Watts. We will look at this in detail later.

The card has two dual link DVI ports as a mini HDMI out. As stated earlier there is a mini HDMI to HDMI converter cable supplied.

For testing today we decided to take a slightly different approach. KitGuru believes that one of the best value for money processors right now is the 6 core AMD 1055T.

We have spent some time showing you how to get 3.7ghz out of it (without extra voltage) so our mid range system will be based around it.

We will be focusing on 1920×1200 and 1920×1080 (1080p) resolutions today, which is ideal for the target audience.

Test System:

eVGA GTX460 768MB Superclocked
Reference GTX460 768MB

Zotac GTX465 Graphics Card
AMD Reference 5850 Graphics Card
AMD Reference 5830 Graphics Card
AMD 1055T @ 3.7ghz
Kingston HyperX 8GB Kit
MSI 890 GXM-G65
Noctua NH CP12 Cooler
Silverstone Raven 2 Chassis
Antec 750W TruPower PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Catalyst 10.6 Driver
ForceWare 258.80 Driver
Fraps Professional
Dell U2410 Panel
Panasonic Viera NeoPDP 600HZ 42 inch Plasma TV
Buffalo 128GB SSD Drive

Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2

3DMark Vantage Professional
Alien V Predator
Far Cry 2
Resident Evil 5
Metro 2033
Tom Clancy HAWX
Grand Theft Auto 4: Episodes From Liberty City
Left 4 Dead 2
Crysis Warhead
HQV Benchmark 2.0
Unigine Heaven Benchmark

All the latest bios updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure. We mix and match various games across our reviews to try and keep our regular readers interested – no one wants to see the same handful of games used in every review.

Unigine is a top-notch technology, that can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of our customers claim that they have never seen such an extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. It is already used in the development of different projects (mostly games).

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

We gave the Unigine Heaven V2.1 benchmark a run on the GTX 460 cards at 1080p resolution with other settings left to default. Shaders high, Tessellation normal, anistrophy 4 and anti aliasing off.

The GTX 460 manages to deliver average frame rates over 30 which is a very strong showing indeed. The eVGA superclocked manages to produce around 1 frame per second more than the reference GTX465. This is particularly interesting because it shows that a 13% increase in score speed generated an 11.2% increase in frame rate in at least one benchmark. That's close to a 1:1 scaling, which bodes well for ardent overclockers among you who want to see just how far you can push your new GTX460.

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.

The eVGA superclocked card gives noticeable benefits in 3DMark Vantage with around 4-5 extra frames per second in most of the tests. While this is purely synthetic, it gives a rough indication of how the extra horsepower could aid game engines on the forthcoming pages.

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.

While the HD5850 leads the pack it is worth bearing in mind it costs around £40 more than the eEVGA Superclocked card in second place, and it is only trailing by four frames per second. The reference GTX 465 is basically indistinguishable when compared with the Superclocked card but it manages to gain 1 fps in the minimum frame rate result. The HD5830 trails the pack in last place.

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. We set the game to 8xAA and 16 texture filtering and maxed all the other settings in game (Ultra High).

Far Cry 2 has always had an engine which favours nVidia hardware/drivers and we can see that the GTX460 superclocked leads the pack by a noticeable handful of frame rates – although minimum frames per second is held by the GTX 465. When you consider that the reference GTX460 is edging out the HD5850 in minimum frames per second its easy to work out that the nVidia boards are still the first choice if you love playing Far Cry 2.

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.

We tested via DX 10 with 8AA, Motion blur ON, Shadow, Texture on and at the native resolution of our 1920×1200 panel.

The eVGA GTX460 superclocked falls slightly behind the reference GTX465, related in part to the lower memory count.  The 1GB GTX460 which is released shortly will assuredly score higher with 8AA enabled. Nonetheless these are a great set of results for the nVidia boards with the HD5830 trailing the pack by a considerable margin.

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 Metro 2033 at the native 1080p resolution of our Panasonic 600hz Plasma Television. DX11, 16af with AAA. We benchmarked with in-game ‘very high’ settings as well as ‘medium’.

Running Metro at very high settings proves to be too much of an ordeal for the hardware on test today, with even the HD5850 struggling to maintain playable frame rates. We lowered the settings to normal within the in game panels and rerun the tests.

Lowering the settings really helps to increase the frame rates and although we would probably lower the resolution a little to further improve the results the HD5850 and GTX465 are mostly playable. The eVGA overclocked card puts in a very similar result to the reference GTX465 with a little bit more ‘hitching' in places. Again we would imagine that the forthcoming 1GB GTX460 is going to improve the Metro 2033 experience.

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 tested DX 10 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.

While the HD5850 leads the pack the eVGA superclocked GTX460 is only 3-4fps behind and the minimum frame rate chart is almost identical throughout. nVidia solutions are particularly strong with this game. The HD5830 once again comes in last.

Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City is a standalone compilation of the DLC episodes for Grand Theft Auto IV, containing both The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony on one disc. It was released alongside the DLC release of The Ballad of Gay Tony on 29 October 2009 for the Xbox 360 and released on 13 April 2010 for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 3. It does not require a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play, nor is an Xbox Live or PSN account necessary (except for multiplayer).

The engine is still extremely demanding for this game – even months later for the newest hardware. The latest version changes some of the rendering calls and is used partially within the latest Max Payne engine.

We tested the game on our 1080p TV and set everything to very high with maximum draw distances. Texture quality was set to ‘medium' – to allow the game memory requirements to fit inside the 768MB available. We know there are some tweaks which can be applied to allow everything to be maxed, but we feel this is an unrealistic option for the majority of the public.

The GTX465 leads the pack by quite a margin. The superclocked eVGA board trails behind the HD5850 however we feel with an extra 256MB of ram that the results would be better. All the cards on test today are playable at this high resolution apart from the HD5830 which struggles to keep the frame rate playable in some of our more intensive test areas.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

In a similar fashion to the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale.

The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the “Director” that monitors the players’ performance and adjust the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Several new features have been introduced: new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects the game’s five campaigns together.

We tested on our 24 inch monitor at native resolution (1920×1200) with 8x MSAA, 16x AF, shader set to very high and all others set to high.

Valve's source engine doesn't prove a challenge on our 24 inch panel at native resolution even with 8AA and all settings maxed. We will now try one of the higher AA modes the nVidia boards support.

The GTX465 takes over the lead with 16Q CSAA settings enabled, helped by the 256 bit memory interface and additional memory. A stunning set of results for all the nVidia hardware however.

Crysis Warhead, like the original Crysis, is based in a future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of (Former SAS) Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns.

In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield. Like Crysis, Warhead uses Microsoft’s Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) for graphics rendering.

Testing was taken from a custom run of Cargo Level at 1080p in DX10, gamer settings.

The HD5850 is easily the leader in Crysis, however we noticed that the minimum frame rates would dip lower than both the GTX465 reference card and the eVGA GTX460 superclocked. All cards can handle the game at these settings apart from the HD5830 which struggles in a few of the heavy action sequences.

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.

	AMD HD5830	NV GTX460
Dial	4	4
Dial with static pattern	5	5
Gray Bars	5	5
Violin	5	5
Stadium 2:2	5	5
Stadium 3:2	5	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5	3
Vertical Text Scroll	5	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0	5
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5	5
Random Noise: Flower	5	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5	5
Scrolling Text	5	3
Roller Coaster	5	3
Ferris Wheel	5	3
Bridge Traffic	5	3
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5	3
Roller Coaster	5	3
Ferris Wheel	5	3
Bridge Traffic	5	3
Luminance Frequency Bands	5	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5	5
Vanishing Text	5	5
Resolution Enhancement	15	15
Theme Park	5	5
Driftwood	2	5
Ferris Wheel	5	3
Skin Tones	7	3
Total	193	177

When we released our original HQV 2.0 Analysis weeks ago we mentioned that nVidia would be starting to enhance their drivers for media settings and we are pleased to report that we documented improvements with the Vertical text scrolling aspect of the HQV analysis. The GTX 460 is equal to the GTX 480 in regards to IQ, and due to the much lower power drain and size the GTX 460 is going to be a fantastic media board. nVidia still have a way to go to catch ATI but they are already making progress with the new drivers.

To overclock the cards today we are using nVidia's own system software and testing for stability in Crysis. We will overclock the reference GTX460 and the eVGA GTX460 Superclocked card.

It is apparent there is some significant headroom as the reference card overclocks to a higher level than the preoverclocked eVGA board. Additionally the eVGA Superclocked card has further headroom and we managed to get the core to 845mhz and the memory to 1000mhz (4,000mhz effective). These are staggering figures and we can see that the dual 6 pin power connectors are giving enhanced stability in overclocked situations.

After applying the overclock we manage to wrangle another 5 fps out of Crysis which is very impressive indeed.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. These results are taken with the system built a Silverstone Raven 02 Chassis.

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. Read these charts carefully, they give data for 4 different card set-ups!

The results show that the GTX 460 runs relatively cool – around 10c less than the GTX 465 and 20-25c less than the GTX 480 in similar situations. We then tested by applying our previous maximum manual overclock to the eVGA card (845mhz core/1000(4000) memory).

Once we manual overclock the eVGA to our maximum manual settings we only record a 2c increase when loaded, which shows that the cooler is doing a very good job of keeping temperatures in check.

Before the release of any product we attend briefings with the company, and it is common for us to feel a mixture of scepticism and disbelief when we listen to executives rant on about performance benefits and why we should be telling the public to buy their solution. nVidia this time around were really pushing the ‘cooler running nature' of this Fermi product as well as extremely low levels of noise from the redesigned cooler. We can understand why it would be a focus mind you as the GTX480 was the complete opposite.

From today 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 20-25dBa. 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 nVidia solutions are extremely quiet and noticeably better than the cooler that is on the reference HD5830 card. When the HD5830 is loaded it becomes audible very quickly, whereas the GTX460 remains fairly quiet at all times.

What is most important to take from this however is that in ‘Real world terms' this basically means that the GTX460 will never be heard above a few case fans. Excellent results for nVidia here.

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.

We are impressed with the idle power drain of the GTX460 as it hovers around 15 watts. When playing Crysis the eVGA Superclocked card consumes slightly more power at around 127 watts, 6 watts or so more than the reference clocked edition. Furmark shows the possible amounts of power the cards can theoretically consume, even if its not realistic in normal gaming situations. These are incidentally around 40-50 watts less when compared directly to the GTX 465 under the same full load conditions.

Fermi done right? Absolutely.

As good as it gets? Possibly.

Why are we hedging our bets at all? Well that has to do with the price point. While the GTX460 (all flavours) certainly brings the fight to AMD for the first time since the launch of the Radeon HD 5000 series we are still painfully aware that most graphics cards will be sold in the sub £100 space. Looking at nVidia's current ‘budget' range, you can see that the 220 is a steaming pile of dung, while the GTS250 has been a serious competitor and certainly a thorn in AMD's side since it launched. With YOYOTech and others selling the 1GB GTX250 at just over £100, regular gamers are being asked to spend almost double to enjoy the GTX460/Radeon HD5830 experience. This becomes a value-judgement.

From KitGuru's point of view, this is a cracking product. The superclocked, 768MB EVGA GTX460 is the best nVidia card to hit the market since October 2006. It represents a four-year high. Bold statement? Maybe, but let's break that down for you, so you understand we are writing from the head and not the heart.

Out of box performance? Great. Stands toe to toe with the closest Radeon card and wins in almost every situation.

Overclocked performance? Very impressive. 10 minutes of tweaking and the superclocked, 768MB EVGA GTX460 will give the Radeon HD 5850 a run for its money. It doesn't beat the 5850, but its close enough that you'd forget the additional £50 you saved.

Build quality, stability and noise? Class leading. It looks good, works well and does its job with a minimum of dBA fuss.

Will this be the best GTX460 card? Probably not. And that's a scary answer if you're presently selling Radeons for AMD. Despite all of the great performance figures we've shared with you, it's obvious that the memory configuration is slightly choking performance. Another 256MB of ram on a 256-bit interface and this card's performance will jump up again – which is exactly what the 1GB version  will deliver.

KitGuru Labs has seen that performance scales almost 1:1 with the GPU's core speed. So if EVGA decided to cherry pick a small batch of ‘queen GPUs', fit a water cooler and clock it even higher – then performance would seriously max out and the HD5850 would need to be careful ‘picking up the soap'.

KitGuru says: If nVidia's engineers had not encountered so many issues with Fermi over the past 2 years, and Jen Hsun's card had been real last September, then AMD would be on the run right now. But the world is a strange place. We've gone round the sun one more time and, in the seasons that have passed, nVidia has missed a lot of opportunities to sell – while watching AMD's market share increase. Things will get more competitive through to Q4 this year, but nVidia has got to be ready for a revamped Northern Islands range that will move the bar much higher. For now, Jen Hsun and Co should pat themselves on the back and enjoy what EVGA has done for them with this stunningly good card. Superclocked, 768MB EVGA GTX460? It rocks!

Update: GTX 460 768MB Superclocked gets 2 years warranty plus 8 years further warranty on registration.

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