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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DOOMHAMMADOOM - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I read your website daily, with that said, I love coming to you guys, as you seem to be one of the more upfront and honest websites out there. You are untouchable when it comes to the quality of SSD reviews.I wasn't bothered by the review, you stated in the beginning why you included it and I thought it was a good point, to me, it seemed like most 460s that are sold are OC versions, so it would make more sense to include one in that scenario.
Including a stock and OC version of every card would be nice if possible. I still came away from the article thinking that AMD has served Nvidia a solid blow here, not that Anandtech was catering to Nvidia.
Ditiris - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I believe you did the right thing by including the EVGA 460 FTW card since it's a retail offering with a retail warranty competing with the launch products.Since you're soliciting for what we'd like to see in reviews, I would like to see one review with the retail offers, and a separate review with attainable overclocks. By attainable overclocks, I mean overclocks which most users can realistically expect to achieve. And of course, I would like to see this for both CPUs and GPUs.
glynor - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
But I would strongly prefer that you keep any overclocked cards to their own segregated comparison page in the articles, and include the warning. It just gives too many opportunities for companies to play games to do otherwise.Otherwise, if a GPU vendor wants to stand up, call it a "product", and stand behind the chip at that clockspeed, they should. If they don't, then that's on them.
Still, when you have a chip like the GTX 460 available and easily overclocked like it is, and OCed variants widely available, you can't really ignore it. That's why I think the separate page is the best way. It makes it separate, and special, like it should be, because those cards are "special" and may come and go.
doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
ummmm errrrrrrr monkey need graph split.Monkey no read.
jav6454 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,I liked that the GTX460 OC was in there; however, the only 'but' I have is that the card should have had it's own mini-article first and then be included. After all a 26% overclock (like you guys stated) lends itself to treat it as a new card; GTX461 or whatever nVidia wished to call it. Which is why, I think it should have been reviewed separately. Compare the GTX 460 OC with the stock GTX 460, and then draw out conclusions. I was thinking that adding the GTX460 OC in there with benchies was sorta throwing a help bone at nVidia by making them not look that bad; seeing as their precious GTX460 was, well, crushed.
I would have not minded at all, if and only if I would have seen a article of it first, and then the HD6870 and HD6850 review came out. But a surprise card just like that was in my view, a huge 'but'. However, I don't make a huge fuzz since the article had clear warnings and clear explanations of why the GTX460 OC was there. Like I said, it was just too 'out of the blue'.
Anyways, I enjoyed the article and quite frankly, neither card interests me; however, it's good to know what these cards can do to the older gen HD5800 series and vs nVidias offerings, I was really surprised how well they fared. What really interests me is the HD6900 series.
haplo602 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Honestly I did not care about the OCed card, it was just one more data point to consider.What I'd like to see would be a dedicated page detailing the overclock range that's being sold and if the EVGA is the top end of the overclocks or the mid range ... that's the info I was missing.
simple_inhibition - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
personally, i think you did the right thing by including the disclaimer in the article, the stock clocked 460 and FTW versions. if there should be any public backlash towards anyone, it should be towards nvidia for throwing together such a half @ssed, last minute attempt to respond to a competing product that they were totally unprepared for.flipmode - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
It was the right move, here is why:1. Factory overclocked cards are, in fact, available on the market and they come backed by full warranties and it is good to know what performance they offer.
2. Seeing the fact that you can get the performance of a 6870 out of a GTX 460 is, in fact, useful information - we all now know that you need about 800 to 850 MHz on a GTX 460 to get in the same range as a 6870.
3. You still tested the reference model GTX 460, which is very, very important to include - very few GTX 460s are actually clocked to 800+ MHz, so the reference provides the lower range of performance.
4. You made very clear in the article that you published that the GTX 460 that you used was a factory overclocked model and you explained some of the issues of that to your readers.
5. Some readers are irrational. Some readers desire that one side wins weather victory is deserved or undeserved. Dear Anandtech: these readers make lots of noise, but it is these readers that can take you down the wrong path.
I always go around saying: I h-a-t-e Nvidia due to the fact that the company will engage in what I consider are unsavory tactics to get consumers to buy their products. So I hate the company, but at the end of the day I'll still buy their product on the merits. If I was shopping right now, I'd probably buy a factory overclocked GTX 460 on the merits: it is cheaper than a 6870 while providing the same performance right out of the box - I don't have to fiddle with it, mod it, install any special software, or drivers, or BIOS, or mess with any sliders and try to overclock it myself; it's ready to use right out of the box and with the full warranty intact.
Thanks for including the factory overclocked GTX 460 Anand - it provided valuable information and it presented your readers with a chance to save money while still getting the same level of performance.
mapesdhs - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
"very few GTX 460s are actually clocked to 800+ MHz,"
Wrong. Scan has _ten_ different cards at 800MHz or more. That's 44% of all the 460s listed.
Ian.
Parhel - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
"Scan has _ten_ different cards at 800MHz or more. That's 44% of all the 460s listed."Not sure what "scan" is, but at Newegg only 4 of the 22 in stock SKUs are clocked at 800Mhz and above. That's about 18%. The next highest under the FTW edition is only clocked at 815Mhz, a full 35Mhz less.
Newegg has only 25 of the FTW cards in stock, using the "add 99 to your cart" method. No other online retailer has any. Anecdotal evidence suggests this card is US only as well. If I had to guess, I'd say around 100 of these cards were produced.