ASUS, EVGA, Zotac GeForce GTX 460 Cards Overclocked and Reviewed
by Ryan Smith on July 12, 2010 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NVIDIA
- GeForce GTX 460
- GPUs
Overclocked Power, Temperature, & Noise
For the Zotac and EVGA cards without voltage tweaking capabilities, the power consumption penalty for overclocking is very minor due to the fact that power consumption increases with voltage much faster than it does with frequency. For the stock-clocked Zotac this is an 18W-36W penalty, while the factory overclocked EVGA cards are even lower (thanks to binning) at just 9W. Meanwhile as expected the Asus card with its voltage tweaking capabilities ends up witnessing a larger jump in power consumption in return for its greater overclock capabilities: 70W under Furmark. This is nearly half of the card’s TDP, so this is a very notable difference.
With only a minor increase in power consumption, our non-voltmodded GTX 460s only experience a minor rise in temperature. The EVGA card only rises in temperature by a single degree, and even the Asus only rises to 72C under Furmark thanks to its more aggressive fan, leaving temperatures well in the safe range for these cards. Zotac card fares the worst here, most likely due to its partially blocked vent – here it reaches a more toasty 86C.
Last but not least we have the noise factor. Thanks to the very low increase in power consumption increase the EVGA and Zotac cards experience when overclocking, the coolers on these cards have to do very little to handle the extra heat. Here the amount of noise generated increased by less than 1.5dB for the already loud Zotac, and in the case of our EVGA cards didn’t increase at all. The Asus card is of course the exception to the rule here, once again due to a combination of the more aggressive cooler and voltage modification. Here the amount of noise generated shoots up by 4.4dB when overclocked, which is a fair trade for the overclock but is definitely going to be more noticeable than the rest of the cards in our collection.
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Taft12 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
The performance gain those driver releases state in various games are vastly overstated. They use an obscure hardware combination to maximize a theoretical performance gain (such as a 5850 in an old P4 system), but what you or I see will be much more modest.adonn78 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
These are the cards everyone wanted form nvidia. cool, quiet, and reasonably priced. I would wait a few weeks before buying anything becuase there are new cpu's coming out from Intel and AMD. Ina ddition with the new performance AMD and nvidia should have price drops. Just in time for back to school season in August.jfelano - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
With the very overclockable 5830 going for around $170 after rebate, it's hard to recommend this card.DominionSeraph - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Nobody uses price after MIR because you'll never see that money.Rebates are a scam.
just4U - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
I really do wish they'd get rid of the whole MIR.heflys - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
Yeah, I agree. I'm just waiting for ATI to knock back their prices. It's inevitable.loganex - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link
Does anyone know how well these 460s fold? How many points per day?ruzveh - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
I would still go in for Zotac card for the feature it displayed in its port. It has full HDMI and Display port which is exactly what i requiredjust4U - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
It's also nice to see them moving to LLT warranties.. to me that was the most interesting part.Mopsen - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link
I don't know if I'll get one of these gtx 460 cards, but I'm still very happy that Nvidia finally brought out a decent card to combat Amd/Atis 5000 series. Prices are bound to drop (hopefully) ^^