Zotac GTX460 AMP! Edition Review

1. Introduction2. The Zotac GTX 460! AMP Edition3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Vantage5. UniGine Heaven Benchmark6. Alien V Predator7. Far Cry 28. Resident Evil 59. Metro 203310. Tom Clancy HAWX11. Grand Theft Auto 4: EFLC12. Left4Dead213. Crysis Warhead14. HQV Benchmark 2.015. Overclocking16. Thermal Dynamics17. Power Consumption18. Acoustics Performance19. Conclusion20. View All Pages

nVidia's GTX460 is without a doubt the strongest card in their current lineup, the pricing is right and the performance has surprised more than a few naysayers. Even though the reference performance is excellent this hasn't stopped manufacturers from releasing their own modded boards and KitGuru recently reviewed the MSI N460GTX Cyclone which earned our top award.

Today we are looking at the latest card from Zotac, the GTX460! AMP Edition which ships with a mighty overclock on both core and memory. The reference clock speeds of 675/3600mhz are enhanced to a whopping 810/4000mhz. This particular card is on a 256 bit memory interface with 1GB of GDDR5.

The significant overclock will surely help performance reach new levels when we get around to testing later. Zotac also informed us before going to press that the cost is only going to be $20 more, which we would guess will mean in the UK a retail asking price around the £210 inc vat point.

Zotac offer a 5 year warranty in Europe and the Middle East with the USA getting a Lifetime warranty as standard … all you need to do is register on the website within 2 weeks of purchase and keep the original receipt.

The AMP! Edition also ships with a free game – Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sand, so the deal looks to be very sweet indeed.

Thankfully thanks to the inclusion of the free game, there are no silly Zotac based dragons on this box art – instead we have the Persian prince  himself about to fly into the blades of the GTX 460 AMP! A painful way to die, but very dramatic.

The card is protected within heavy duty foam supports, clearly taken from the packaging of a bigger card – the GTX460! AMP takes up only two thirds of the space.

The bundle contains a software CD, with the free game and a manual with guides. There is also a VGA adapter and two power converter cables which make life easy if you don't have any spare PCIe power connectors.

The card itself is an attractive design with an orange fan and dark PCB. The yellow ‘racing' stripes give it a sporty look.

The cooling shroud has metal ridges along one side which aid with cooling properties.

The fan is a 9 blade design with a Zotac sticker in the middle. The orange color is certainly eye catching.

The AMP! edition is fully SLI capable.

It requires 2 x 6 pin PCI power connectors, just like the reference design board. There are two dual link DVI connectors as well as a single Displayport connector with HDMI on the other side.

Removing the cooler is a simple process, just remove 4 screws on the reverse side of the PCB.

The cooler lifts off and we can see the GPU and PCB design underneath.

The cooler has a copper heatsink in the middle with plenty of thermal paste on the core. This leads into a thick adjoining fin section down the length of the shroud to aid with cooling properties.

The specifications of the card as listed in GPUZ. These are impressive ‘out of the factory' clock figures – but as the AMP! editions are hand picked in the factory we would expect this.

For testing today we decided to take a slightly different approach. KitGuru believes that one of the best value for money processor 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:

Zotac GTX460 AMP! Edition

Reference GTX460 768MB
Reference 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 10.7 Driver
ForceWare 258.96 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.

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.

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.  For today we will be testing focusing on both Performance and Extreme resolutions. The default setting that most people use to compare their scores world wide is 1280×1024 which is referred to as the Performance level. As the HIS 5850 iCooler V Turbo is one of the higher performing cards today, we will also focus on the Extreme settings. This setting uses the resolution of 1920×1200 and puts far more strain on the GPU then the default settings.

The Zotac GTX460 AMP! Edition thrashes the reference clocked GTX460 and sends it home crying like a little schoolgirl. The overclock on the card is already shaping up to be killer.

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 460/465 cards at 1080p resolution with other settings left to default. Shaders high, Tessellation normal, anisotrophy 4x and anti aliasing off.

The nVidia boards are particularly strong with this benchmark – the GTX 460 AMP! for instance is on average five frames per second faster than the HD5850 iCooler V Turbo card we tested this week.

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.

This is the first time we have seen a GTX460 right on the heels of the HD5850, the Zotac is just trailing by a single frame per second in the average settings. There is a huge difference between this card and the reference edition which only manages 33 on average.

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 has always worked well with nVidia hardware/drivers and this is no exception today. The AMP! Edition is leading the pack by a strong 4-5 frames per second. nVidia boards should be your first choice if this game is one you play regularly.

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 Zotac AMP! board shows its true colours here, able to match the performance from the GTX465 throughout. We are seeing around 8-9 fps extra when compared to the reference clocked edition, significant improvements.

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 high settings with any of the boards today proves to be a difficult task with minimum frame rates juddering under 20 during intensive sections. We lower settings to normal within the game panels and rerun the benchmarks.

Lowering to normal, really helps performance smooth out throughout the environments. The HD5850 still manages a single frame per second more on average, but scores the same as the AMP! in regards to minimum. The difference between the overclocked GTX460 and the reference board in this case means one is playable, the other isn't.

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.

The Zotac AMP! edition is able to maintain between 8-10 fps more than the reference clocked edition and is smoother during a specific flight section near the end of our benchmark run.

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 is leading the pack, but only by a couple of frame per second which isn't really that noticeable during real world testing. The massively overclocked Zotac card manages to tie with the HD5850 with average frames per second. A great result.

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, shaders 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 huge overclocks on the Zotac board mean it can hold onto the GTX465, only dropping a few frames per second during a specific section. Very impressive results indeed.

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 overclocks really help this card to push significantly higher frame rates throughout our testing. minimum frame rates are better throughout with only one dip into the 25-30 sector.

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	Zotac GTX460 AMP!
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 MSI’s Afterburner software and testing for stability in Crysis. We will overclock the reference GTX460 and the Zotac GTX460 AMP!

The reference card managed to overclock to 810mhz Core and 960 mhz memory, and the Zotac GTX460 AMP! achieved a staggering figure of 925mhz on the core and 1075mhz on the memory. This is even better than the MSI N460GTX Cyclone we reviewed a while ago.

With our manual overclocking we were able to push the Crysis experience beyond that recorded with the HD5850 at manual clocks. These are great results.

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.

The Zotac card runs cooler than the reference card at idle, but heats up more when under load. Obviously the large overclocks on the core and memory are causing this. We now apply our manual overclock achieved on the last page and rerun our stress tests.

Overclocking the card to over 900mhz resulted in temperatures rising by around 7 c both when gaming and when running Furmark. We didn't notice any additional noise however, so it appears Zotac have configured the card to remain fairly quiet at all times, something we always like.

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.

The Zotac GTX460 AMP! consumes around 3 watts more than the reference card when idle and when gaming this rises to 153 watts, around 30 more than the reference board. When running Furmark, we see the power consumption peak at around 190 watts.

Recently 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 Zotac AMP! is one of the quietest GTX460 cards we have tested, besting even the 34.4dB rating from the MSI 460GTX Cyclone. Another good reason this would make a good hybrid media/gaming card.

KitGuru has been singing the praises of the GTX460 since it was released. We thought both eVGA and MSI versions we reviewed offered superb value for money with class leading performance. The Zotac AMP! Edition is the fastest GTX460 card we have tested to date, thanks to the very generous core and memory clock enhancements.

Our testing today has shown that Zotac have balanced the card to offer low noise levels while providing enough cooling power to keep it in the ‘safe zone'. That said, 84c when running Furmark is the highest temperature we have yet to record with a GTX460 … its perfectly safe however.

The card has further potential for manual overclocking and we managed to push the core to 925mhz and the memory to 1075mhz offering even more frame rate improvements at the cost of temperature increases, reaching the 90c mark. We feel that manual fan configuration would be a prerequisite for peace of mind if you wanted to run at these speeds.

The Zotac bundle is impressive, we are glad to see Dirt 2 removed from the bundle and replaced with the excellent new Prince Of Persia title which offers something fresh and diverse to a potential customer.

When compared with a reference GTX460, power consumption is higher with the AMP!, between 30-40 watts extra being drained from the power supply under load. It is just a side factor of the increased voltage PCB design and overclocked configuration.

When weighing all of this into a final decision, we feel the extra $20 is well worth it when compared to a standard GTX460.

KitGuru says: The GTX460 AMP! is an excellent board which combines class leading performance with low noise and high overclocking prowess.

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