ECS GeForce GTX 460 Black review

Within the entire scope of Fermi GPU based graphics cards from NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 460 has to be the most interesting in terms of value for money with very acceptable decent thermals and power consumption. This is why we see a lot of SKUs released for this product, with a variety of cooling and factory overclocks.

The GeForce GTX 460 comes in many forms, shapes and sizes, but pretty much all of the cards out there are based on the NVIDIA reference design. That by itself is a rock solid design with no compromises at all. However we are gurus and we like to see things within their own little niche and that x-factor. As such it's always with the greatest pleasure that we review the more customized products.

ECS Elite Group also released a handful of GeForce GTX 460 cards, based on the reference design with a slight overclock, yet also a BLACK series graphics card which is a factory overclocked model with an Arctic Cooling Twin Turbo PRO cooler sitting on top of that GPU. Now we've already seen a couple of models based on this cooling solution, but the ECS card really is something special.

We spot amazingly cool temperatures of the GPU versus a downright nice factory overclock. And for the freaks, if you like to overclock a little yourself and utilize software like MSI's Afterburner then this product can be overclocked even further, really high actually, yet still have a product that remains 100% silent. Of course we are here to find out all about it and that.

Have a peek at the product tested today, the ECS GeForce GTX 460 Black series graphics card, armed with 1024MB of video memory and the desire to perform really well. Next page please.

The GPU that makes it happen... GF104

So then, the GeForce GTX 460. We are first going to discuss REFERENCE specifications, clocks and features.

Typically, we dive deeply into the graphics core architecture. For this article, being very lengthy, I would like to keep things a little bit more simple and easy to grasp -- to keep things understandable.

The GeForce GTX 460 series is to be based on a new chip. Initially the Fermi architecture that you have all seen on the GTX 465, 470 and 480 is based on the GF100 chip. The mid-range GeForce GTX 460 is still based on that Fermi architecture, yet for this round NVIDIA designed a new chip, so this is not a GF100 with disabled Shader clusters. Make no mistake here, the architecture is still based on Fermi, same setup, same caches, yet now a much smaller chip with less transistors (2.1 Billion to be precise), called the GF104. GF104 is a less complicated chip to manufacture as the smaller transistor count directly relates to better yields, better heat levels, better voltages and thus a better TDP as well. It is a smaller chip to produce.

For this round NVIDIA puts the GF104 chip onto two products, the GeForce GTX 460 with 768MB of graphics memory and the GeForce GTX 460 with 1024MB of memory. For the bigger part of the specifications, the two are similar when it comes to shader processor count, memory bus and clock frequencies, the 1GB model however definitely will be a good chunk faster, as cutting away 256MB of memory also cuts away a chunk of the ROP engine.

So you might wonder, why two models? Well, initially we felt that the 768MB version would end up in OEM mostly, then again, at sub-200 USD this card surprised us as it offers a lot of bang for buck alright. Who knows, time will tell which model will sell the best. Regardless of its 768MB of memory, as we'll demonstrate it is a sexy performer in the mid-range for sure.

Yes, performance wise these cards will be really interesting. But we'd almost forget that the GeForce GTX 460 cards will be fully fledged DirectX 11 class cards with nice tessellation performance and the full DX11 API feature set. Though only a handful of games really show significant DX11 class quality, we really feel that if you are in the market for a new graphics card, DX11 is obviously the path to follow.

Should you not yet be familiar with DirectX 11 and stuff like shaders and Tessellation, we'll explain all that in our standard skinny of content over the next few pages as well, don't worry... this is Guru3D.com and we explain everything as much as we can in understandable wording and terms. Let's compare some of the specs to the GeForce GTX 465, which we really think will go EOL real fast, real soon, as the GTX 460 cards are equally fast and often even faster due to all the OC edition SKUs.

Reference specifications:

Graphics card	GeForce GTX 460 768MB	GeForce GTX 460 1024MB	GeForce GTX 465 1024MB
Graphics Processing Clusters	2	2	3
Streaming Multiprocessors	7	7	11
Shader processor	336	336	352
Texture Units	56	56	44
ROPs	24	32	32
Core Clock	675 MHz	675 MHz	607 MHz
Shader Clock	1350 MHz	1350 MHz	1215 MHz
Memory Data rate	3600 MHz	3600 MHz	3200 MHz
Graphics Memory	768MB GDDR5	1024MB GDDR5	1024MB GDDR5
Memory interface	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory bandwidth	86.4 GB/s	115.2 GB/s	102.6 GB/S
Texture Fillrate Bilinear	37.8 GigaTexels/sec	37.8 GigaTexels/sec	26.7 GigaTexels/sec
Fab node	40nm	40nm	40nm
TDP	150 Watts	160 Watts	200 Watts

If you look closely at the SM partitions, then you can see and calculate that the 336 Shader processors based GF104 has in fact eight SM partitions. 7 are enabled = 336 Shader processors. But expect another SKU in the future as well, as that GPU really has 384 shader processors.

Okay, so back to the two reference SKUs, let me break them down real simple:

• GeForce GTX 460 768MB - 336 Shader processor - 56 TMUs - 24 ROPs - TDP 22/150W - MSRP 199 USD
• GeForce GTX 460 1024MB -336 Shader processor - 56 TMUs - 32 ROPs - TDP 22/160W - MSRP 229 USD

So, both cards in reference setup will be clocked at 675 MHz on the core frequency, and in NVIDIA's typical 1:2 setup mode 1350 MHz on the 336 shader processors. There will be a lot of overclocking headroom on these boards as 800 MHz should not be an issue (even without voltage tweaking). The gDDR5 memory will be clocked at a slightly shy 3.6 Gbps which is 3600MHz effectively (quad data rate). The 768MB version then will make use of three 64-bit memory controllers which boils down to 192-bit memory, and the 1024 GB model has one extra cluster of 256MB attached to it, which requires one more 64-bit memory controller and this one operates at 256-bit memory bus width.

The cards are based on a dual or even triple-slot cooling design and come with two dual-link DVI and a mini-HDMI connector. HDMI will again pass sound through, including bit streaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master. Being a mid-range product, only 2-way SLI will be allowed and thus you'll only see a single SLI finger/connector on the PCBs. Okay, the next stop will be an extensive photo-shoot.

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