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
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
620 Comments
View All Comments
CrazyGPU - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I do think that it was a correct choice to bring up the 460 OC cause its a real competitor of the 6870 price performance wise.I also want to congratulate Anand for being so good at making reviews over the years.
rs1 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"From my standpoint, having more information never hurts."Here, I agree with you. There's nothing wrong with including an extra datapoint for a factory-overclocked card when the overclock is large enough to make a tangible difference in performance. However, treating the overclocked card as the "official" competitor of the reference 6850/6870 does not fall under the category of "having more information". I get that nVidia wants the story spun that way, but that doesn't mean that you should go along with it.
At the very least, treating an overclocked nVidia card as the official competitor of the reference 6850/6870 completely discounts the possibility of overclocked 6850/6870 cards. That's not really fair to AMD, and comes across as a fairly serious omission in my opinion. If an overclocked card is going to be treated as the primary competitor then I think the fair and balanced thing to do is to also overclock the card(s) under test as much as possible, and include the overclocked numbers in the results (or maybe generate two sets of results, one for cards running at stock settings, and one for overclocked, and then the comparisons are always fair). Then people truly do get more, because they can see the complete picture. To do otherwise just writes off the possibility that vendors will be releasing 6800 series cards that also sport a 26% overclock in the coming weeks and months, and which blow right past the overclocked GTX 460.
Really though, I think the place for benchmarks of an overclocked GTX 460 card is in the GTX 460 article itself. Would it be so terrible if people interested in seeing how an overclocked GTX 460 compares to a stock 6800 had to click a link to the GTX 460 article and browse through to get a feel for approximately how much faster the overclocked card was? In general an overclocked card is not going to outperform its reference model by more than 10-15%, so including only reference models when comparing between product lines is not unreasonable. Anyone wondering how an overclocked card of a given series would perform can just add ~15% to the reference score and come away with a reasonable upper-bound.
So I don't fault you for including an overclocked card, but I do fault you for branding the overclocked card as the official competition for the 6800 series, and for not including benchmarks of overclocked 6800 series cards in all the comparisons. Even if you had to overclock the reference cards yourself, having the numbers there for comparison is more fair than having no overclocked 6800 representative at all.
doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
Sorry, how exactly did Anandtech treat this as the 'official' competitor, and why are you so desperate to distinguish 'official' from 'unofficial'. You can 'officially' buy the EVGA card, who cares who manufacturers it? It's a card, it works, what's the problem?You make out like this HAS to be some kind of battle between NVidia and AMD, but that's ridiculous. It's a comparison of ALL GRAPHICS CARDS, to find which offers the best value for money.
You then claim that they have discounted the possibility of overclocked 6850/6870 cards. How exactly? Where in the article did they state that there wouldn't be overclocked 6850/6870 cards? Of course they didn't, so of course they aren't discounting anything. The critical point here is that there aren't overclocked cards YET, so as of right now, they didn't have the option to include a factory overclocked 6850/6870. But wait, are you saying that means they are not allowed to review the EVGA card until some random competitor makes a new card? How is that reasonable? The EVGA card is available right now, so why not include it? If you release a product first, and it's available to buy RIGHT NOW, when a competitor has not managed that, that is NOT reason to refuse to review it. By that logic, before reviewing any new card from any manufacturer, we have to wait until an other manufacturer releases a new card, whenever that may be. That's ridiculous. When you do a review, you review what is AVAILABLE at the time.
IF 6850 and 6870 overclocked cards come along in the future and are then ignored, THEN you can cry about it. Until then, wake up and realise that all Anandtech did was show the competition.
And manual overclocks of the 6850 and 6870, couldn't be more irrelevant. This is FACTORY warranted overclocks, there's a big difference.
Quizzical - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Including the EVGA GTX 460 FTW was a huge mistake, but for reasons that no one has yet touched on. (And yes, I did read all of the previous comments.)You've really got two different audiences here. One is the people who follow tech and know when parts launch and read reviews right after they are posted. That's the people who are replying to this thread. For people who might buy such a card today, including factory overclocks is fine, though it would probably be better to either include a lot of factory overclocked cards or none at all.
But the other is people who want to buy a new computer, haven't been following tech, and want to know what to get. They'll come along and check reviews months later. They probably won't read the whole thing; they just want to know enough to have some idea of what to get, so that they don't pay $100 for a low end card like a GeForce G 210 or a Radeon HD 5450 thinking it's going to be a great gaming card.
Go here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/14
That's the conclusion to your Radeon HD 5850 review. Basically, great value for $260. And it was. But it didn't stay at $260 for long. In that case, at launch, it would have been a pretty good value for $300, too. But you (meaning, AnandTech writers collectively) probably wouldn't have been quite as positive about it had it launched at $300. The original article doesn't mention the price hike.
Now, I don't believe that was intentional shenanigans on AMD's part. They probably intended to get twice as many Cypress wafers in 2009 and keep the cards in stock at $260. They didn't expect TSMC to be unable to deliver. But price hikes on all models of a major card like the 5850 are rare.
Price hikes on individual SKUs like the EVGA GTX 460 FTW are not so rare. Nor are such cards disappearing entirely. For that matter, have a look at it right now on New Egg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Oops, it's out of stock. That was fast. There is a second SKU of it for $10 more still in stock, for now. No idea how long that will last.
Now go back and read the conclusion of the Radeon HD 6870 review. It surely would have been more positive about the 6870 if one had completely ignored the heavily overclocked GTX 460.
How long do you think the EVGA GTX 460 1 GB FTW will be around? Out of 48 GeForce GTX 460s on New Egg, it's not just the largest overclock. It's the largest by a whopping 35 MHz. There are eight others in the 800-815 MHz range, so plenty of other companies are trying for big overclocks, too. If a lot of GPUs were suitable for a factory overclock to 850 MHz, don't you think someone other than EVGA would have managed to release a factory overclock to at least 820 MHz?
What stops Nvidia from providing a few hundred cherry-picked GPUs to EVGA for a PR stunt to coincide with the launch of an AMD card? Maybe they sell the GPUs for one particular SKU significantly cheaper than they would have otherwise, and simply absorb a cost of several thousand dollars as a marketing expense. That's well worth for them it if it gets reviewers to tone down praise of the Radeon HD 6870 enough that hundreds of people who check sites like this months down the road decide to buy an Nvidia card rather than a Radeon HD 6870.
I'll tell you what stops it. If reviewers ignore the factory overclocked GTX 460 in the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 review, that stops it. But you didn't do that. And you'd better believe that Nvidia will try it again in the future. After seeing how well it worked, AMD might well try it, too, as they'll now be able to say, you did it for Nvidia, so you have to do it for us or else they'll have a legitimate claim of bias.
So how does only reviewing reference cards stop this? Surely we can all agree that a GeForce GTX 460 1 GB for $100 would be a great deal, at least for the end consumer. If Nvidia wanted to slash prices to that level, and the review conclusion said, go get the cheap GTX 460 instead, there would be nothing wrong with the review saying that.
But Nvidia can't do that without losing their shirt. They can offer an artificially good deal on one particular SKU of one card from one board partner for one short period of time as a PR stunt. They can't do that with all of the GTX 460s at once or else they lose money on the card. Try to do that to counter every review and you lose money on all of your cards, and then go out of business. They can eat several thousand dollars to spike some reviews as a marketing expense. They can't so well eat a loss of millions of dollars to dampen enthusiasm over the launch of a competitor's cards.
Parhel - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Excellent find:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Wow! Just . . . wow. The GTX 460 FTW edition, in stock for half a day.
Just long enough to fool reviewers into thinking this was a real card.
doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
Yeah, just WOW.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
In stock. Get a grip child.
redpriest_ - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
100% agreement with Quizzical on this.bennyg - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Good point well made. If a 800-815MHz gtx460 had been chosen instead, it would make far less difference if it had sold out so quickly as there were other similar parts for similar prices around.The issue boils down to the evga gtx460 being so different from the rest - that picking it and not mentioning the other issues was a mistake.
Issues being: price changes? availability (both of GPUs from those top bins, and to market)? engineered stunt? other companies with similar clocked parts coming soon, or not?
Antah Berantah - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
So good is gtx 460, any other card you buy can easily overclocked to at least 850 mhz- i'm going to push my gtx 460 hawk to 1 ghz. so the evga gtx 460 ftw is just an ordinary overclocked cards and compare it to stock 6870 is fair.If you want to compare overclocked 6870 with overclocked gtx 460, please pick up any 6870 cards you like and overclocking it as highest as possible then compare it with my gtx 460 hawk in its highest.
spigzone - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Excellent, well thought out and written post.