Your Feedback On The Use of EVGA's GeForce GTX 460 FTW in Last Night's Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2010 5:55 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Last night we published our Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 review. In it we made a decision to include a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 460 from EVGA (the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW). For those who aren't aware, NVIDIA has allowed a number of its partners to ship GTX 460s at higher than stock clock speeds. A practice that has been done in the past. The cards are available in retail with full warranties.
A number of you responded in the comments to the article very upset that we included the EVGA card. Even going as far to accuse us of caving to NVIDIA's pressure and demands. Ryan and I both felt it was necessary to address this front and center rather than keep the discussion in the comments.
Let's start with the obvious. NVIDIA is more aggressive than AMD with trying to get review sites to use certain games and even make certain GPU comparisons. When NVIDIA pushes, we push back. You don't ever see that here on AnandTech simply because I don't believe this is the place for it. Both sides (correction, all companies) have done nasty things in the past but you come here to read about products, not behind the scenes politics so we've mostly left it out of our reviews.
NVIDIA called asking for us to include overclocked GTX 460s in the 6800 series article. I responded by saying that our first priority is to get the standard clocked cards tested and that if NVIDIA wanted to change the specs of the GTX 460 and guarantee no lower clocked versions would be sold, we would gladly only test the factory overclocked parts. NVIDIA of course didn't change the 460's clocks and we ended the conversation at that. We gave NVIDIA no impression that we would include the card despite their insistence. The decision to include the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW was made on our own entirely.
We don't like including factory overclocked parts in our reviews for reasons we've already mentioned in the article itself. This wasn't a one off made for the purpose of reviewing only, it's available from online vendors and a valid option from a price comparison. Furthermore it presented us with an interesting circumstance where the overclock was large enough to make a significant impact - the 26% overclock pushed the card to a performance level that by all rights could have (and should have) been a new product entirely.
From my standpoint, having more information never hurts. This simply provides another data point for you to use. We put hefty disclaimers in the article when talking about the EVGA card, but I don't see not including a publicly available product in a review as a bad thing. It's not something we typically do, but in this case the race was close enough that we wanted to cover all of our bases. At the end of the day I believe our conclusion did just that:
At $179 buy the 6850. At $239 buy the 6870 for best performance/power. If you want the best overall performance, buy the GTX 470. However, as long as they are available the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW is a good alternative. You get the same warranty you would on a standard GTX 460, but you do sacrifice power consumption for the performance advantage over the 6870.
We were honestly afraid that if we didn't include at least a representative of the factory overclocked GTX 460s that we would get accused of being too favorable to AMD. As always, this is your site - you ultimately end up deciding how we do things around here. So I'm asking all of you to chime in with your thoughts - how would you like to handle these types of situations in the future? Do we never make exceptions even in the case of a great number of factory overclocked cards being available on the market? Do we keep the overclocked comparison to a single page in the review? Or does it not matter?
And if you're worried about this being tied to financial gain: I'll point out that we are one of the only sites to have a clear separation of advertising and editorial (AnandTech, Inc. doesn't employ a single ad sales person, and our 3rd party sales team has no stake in AT and vice versa). The one guarantee that I offer all of our writers here at AnandTech is you never have to worry about where your paycheck is coming from, just make sure you do the best job possible and that your conclusions are defensible.
If we've disappointed you in our decision to include the EVGA FTW in last night's review, I sincerely apologize. At the end of the day we have to maintain your trust and keep you all happy, no one else. We believed it was the right thing to do but if the overwhelming majority of you feel otherwise, please let us know. You have the ability to shape how we do things in the future so please let us know.
Whether you thought it was an issue or not, we'd love to hear from you. I do appreciate you reading the site and I want to make it better for you in the future.
GP
Take care,
Anand
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TemplarGR - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Anand,First of all, i am no fanboy of either company. I am a professional developer, and on my home machines i use only one Ati gpu card, one nvidia gpu card, and intel cpus(+ gpu). I am not in love with a company. But I AM IN LOVE with technology and superior products. What i hate most, is when an inferior product outsells the competition based on marketing and sleazy "journalists". I just hate it.
Once upon a time, before discovering your site, i used to read Tom's Hardware. I abandoned it when i found out that it clearly favoured intel and nvidia. They didn't have the superior products, yet their reviews were biased. I never visit this site anymore and warn all people professional and not not to go there.
I really want to believe you never did anything to hurt ati in favour of nvidia conciously. The problem is, you are years in this business. You are no amateur, so i believe this was no accident, especially when you admit Nvidia's pressure.
So, instead of sticking to your policy, you included an OC card in the review. This is a lame attempt to save Nvidia and nothing more. And i bet all those people in favour of this desicion in the comment section belong to Nvidia's PR(professional and volunteer). But all us professionals with half a brain, know what you just did...
You want to know why? Because this was no simple review of a new card. This was the unveiling of AMD's new gpu architecture. So this will create a lasting impression, far more important than comparing simple retail cards.
AMD is in the process of releasing a more mature architecture, with a much reduced die size, temperatures, noise, power usage, with added features, faster when compared the older series(6800 is replacing 5700 not 5800), faster with DX11 games, and competitive in price.
Now you, instead of presenting AMD's improvements, after pressure from Nvidia you include a factory OCd card in order to make NVIDIA's offerings look much better than what they reallly are, and spoil AMD's release by making it look like AMD's new architecture is on par with Nvidia's Fermi...
If you really wanted to include OC cards, you should:
a) Include OCd cards from AMD, or OC yourself reference cards.
b) Include factory GTX 460
c) Add the OC in the name of GTX 460 in the graphs... THIS IS SLEAZY ANAND! The graphs matter,
and they write "NVIDIA GTX460 1GB", they do not define it as and OCed card...
You did nothing of those, and i believe these ARE VALID COMPLAINS.
This was no accident, you did it on purpose, and this is sad. One question only: What did NVIDIA offer to you?
mapesdhs - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
"b) Include factory GTX 460"They did. Are you blind??
Ian.
Antah Berantah - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 - link
Read the review twice before you comment.thebest11778 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I appologize if someone else already posted this, but at this point there's already 147 posts sooooo I'm not going to go through them all.I understand why you used a factory OCed GTX460 to demonstrate what other options are available. More options are good. However the big question then becomes "How well would an OCed 6870 stack up?"
My recommendation would be to take a stock GTX 460 and AMD 6870 and OC each of them to their maximum, present the clock speeds, the voltages, the new power draws, and new noise levels. This way not only can we see how the cards truely stack up against each other, but we can see headroom in each card. Let's face it many of your readers are going to OC them themselves if they get them. I'd also recommend letting us know what tools you used to perform the overclocks (took me forever to find the right MSI afterburner when the GTX470 launched.)
I hope that helps.
3DVagabond - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
If the review was done just between reference cards the nVidia cards would have looked pretty bad. With the 460 getting beat soundly and the 470 being overpriced by comparison. Many people don't read every part of a review. So, the "disclaimer" by Anandtech doesn't make sure everyone gets the information. It also doesn't stop people from quoting the review out of context. 11th hour price cuts and "ringer" products delivered by the competition aren't done without prejudice.MGSsancho - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I would prefer to see FOC (Factory Over Clocked) cards mainly in the bench thing but not in primary reviews. Include a single page on the main reviews then do an extensive over clock review the following week or so. Would be cool to include the disclaimers and to have the FOC cards have FOC preceding the names on the bench. This way I know what it is and I can look at the price too. It would also tell me if I wanted to overclock it myself, what results (pros/cons) I could anticipate. Maybe some of use would rather get a cheaper product then void my warenty for performance. Some may only have their machines on a few hours a day so the noise, stress and heat are not issues. Others leave their rigs on longer than the stockmarket is open and thus leaving. 200w idle machine isn't a good idea while knowing everything they have is warenteed for the year. So yes I would like to see FOC cards included. I would rather know what the card is capible of. Just like how some CPUs have increadible headroom and thus are great buys while others are best left alone.All in all the openess for a meeting of the minds and the forum avaliable for Anandtech staff and their readers is what makes it possible to keep the site fresh n' tasty while the trolls are left in the past along with the water over their bridge.
nirolf - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I can't say that including the EVGA card was a mistake. But it would seem fair to have an overclocked 6870 in that case. And even 6850, the low clock speed is quite promising for overclocking.Ok, they're not available right now, but neither was the FTW when 460 launched. So you could have overclocked the card to a safe level and give us that as a comparison. From what I remember the FTW cards don't have much headroom left for overclocking. Instead, we didn't even get an overclocking section in the review, it's mysteriously missing, while the 460 review had extensive overclocking results.
So, while I believe that Anandtech is a trusted sources of reviews, my opinion is that this time it was an unfair game.
kdpfefer@juno.com - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I come to this site for anand's thoughtful and onest reviews,it doesn't hurt to get more information.
PS I also agree with Granseth and his opinion on re Questions
on Nvidia's suggestions
dragosmp - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
About the inclusion of the GTX460 FTW, I'm not debating if this is correct or not, but this is what you achieved.When you included this one OCed card you may have mislead people into thinking that all factory overclocked GTX 460 cards are as good as that - you created the GTX 462. Not all retail GTX 462 are as good as this, this is a best case scenario - you failed to point this out. You also failed to clearly show the price range a GTX 462 may have - the possibility may arise one thinks he's getting a cheaper OCed GTX460 with the performance in your review, but not so, he's actually getting a slower clocked card with lower performance. OCed GTX 460 speeds aren't pegged at the level of the card you've been using (at least you should have been using an average - overclocked card).
Buying an overclocked cards implies knowledge of what clock speed is and how more is better - this is (semi)enthusiast territory. We know to OC our cards and that any vanilla GTX 460 1GB can achieve the performance you posted for the EVGA FTW. Since you showed "the best" a GTX 460 can stable 24/7 do, why not pushing also a 6850/6870/GTX 470?
The EVGA FTW review should have been part of another article on "OCing midrange cards", or "Factory OC roundup" - these cards would have in common volatile clocks and prices.
For me it was somewhat easy to ignore the OCed card scores in the graphs, and the fact you mixed SLI/Xfire cards in the same graph with single cards. Mix'n matching is a bad point to this review from my pow. My 2 cents: do more focused articles, don't try to respond all readers with one product.
Antah Berantah - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 - link
I beg your pardon, but GTX 460 FTW is not the best scenario, it's a good scenario. the best scenario is, any other gtx 460 out there can be overclocked to 900.