ASUS, EVGA, Zotac GeForce GTX 460 Cards Overclocked and Reviewed

Final Words

Wrapping up our look at vendor cards for today's GeForce GTX 460 launch, we’ll start with what’s probably the weakest card from the launch, the Zotac GTX 460 1GB.

The Zotac card is both a bit bold and a bit conservative in its design, and frankly we’re not quite sure why it didn’t work out. Zotac effectively attempted to emulate the Radeon 5850’s cooling setup on a GTX 460 card, and given their similar TDP it should have worked. This design should be more than adequate to quietly cool a card like the GTX 460 1GB, but instead we ended up with something that’s much hotter and much louder than any of the other GTX 460 designs we’ve seen today.

We’re big fans of the Radeon 5800 layout, as it affords good cooling without compromising on the port selection. While everyone else is offering only DVI and HDMI ports, Zotac is offering DisplayPort along with everything else, which moving forward we believe to be a good idea. We’d like to see this port configuration on future GTX 460 cards, but first it looks like Zotac needs to go back and work out the quirks of their design.

Next we have EVGA’s GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked, which unlike the other cards in our roundup doesn’t deviate from NVIDIA’s reference design at all. In this case this is a very reasonable choice, as the reference GTX 460 design offers great cooling and low noise in a compact package. For a $20 premium over a reference card EVGA offers a solid factory overclock, excellent overclocking software, and a lifetime warranty, a tantalizing collection that’s spoiled by the existence of the 1GB GTX 460.

As we discussed in the conclusion of Part 1 of our review, the 1GB GTX 460 makes much more sense than the 768MB GTX 460 due to the higher performance and greater degree of futureproofness. This is further compounded in the case of the EVGA SuperClocked card, as that’s now a $10 price gap. The factory overclock alone isn’t enough to close the gap, and there’s no guarantee a SuperClocked card is any more likely to overclock well than a normal card. The EVGA SuperClocked is a fine card, but when EVGA also will be selling a 1GB card with the same excellent overclocking tools it’s hard to suggest the slower card for only $10 in savings. In this light we would recommend an EVGA 1GB card over the 768MB SuperClocked, otherwise between this and the Asus card this is the 768MB card to get for casual overclockers who are not ready to take a dive in to voltage tweaking.

Finally we have Asus’s entry, the only fully-custom card in our roundup. Asus takes the extreme overclocking angle and makes a solid delivery; with our sample achieving a 38% core overclock over a stock clocked GTX 460. At a premium of only $10 (and some noise) over a reference card this is clearly the overclocking card to get for well-versed enthusiasts who are willing to take the risks of voltage tweaking. But even Asus eventually runs in to the same problem EVGA does: overclocking just puts you in competition with slightly more expensive 1GB cards. Ultimately this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s something that needs to be taken in to consideration.