Efficiency, Price, And Performance Value
Our previous page showed that added performance generally requires added power, though the performance differences were far greater than power differences. Let’s see how the overclocked cards compare to the reference-clocked card by way of efficiency.
Overclocking improves efficiency by allowing much more “work” to be done at similar power levels. The most likely reason for Palit’s huge lead is a reliance on GPU voltage that’s similar to Nvidia’s reference design voltage.
Jetway drops out of the retail price chart for two reasons: First, its sample is non-retail. Second, even if Jetway had sent its retail KN460EW1GV-A, a lack of availability in the U.S. market would prevent us from assigning a Web price to the chart. We hope to see Jetway graphics products reach U.S. vendors in the near future.
Ignoring added-value items like extended warranties and in-box games gives us a simplified value chart above. Of course, that chart will be meaningless to overclockers, as GPU temperature is a better metric for judging how far they might be able to push these cards.
That is to say, we’re not willing to completely dismiss added value, especially when it comes to warranties and support. So, which card would we pick?
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Great article!
Good testing methodology, and useful conclusions.
This will be very helpful when trying to distinguish between the 460 1GBs.
Thanks!
Nice article.
Was going to purchase 2 of the palit 460's. I did not know of the 1 year only warranty.
Hmmmm food for thought, maybe Evga? Since their support is very good. Something to think about.
Im going to get 2 MSI cyclones
As said, excellent article. Inconveniently timed, as I order the MSI cyclone one a few nights ago, for the same price as the Palit one. Dammit!
Thanks a lot, Thomas!
Please note, that you actually get Metro 2033 with the EVGA 460 (US, Canada & EU), if you register it and are prepared to use Steam.
Source: http://www.evga.com/articles/00569/
EVGA or go home.
wow surprised by the palit.
Why does this site look so bad in Firefox? At first I though it was because I was running an Add Blocker, but even with that turned off it still looks terrible....Fine in IE, poorly formated in Mozilla, it's like a flashback to 1997! ;-)
Great info, but what about FANLESS cards? I'm always interested in these graphics cards (and many of Tom's Hardware) articles, but always disappointed that there never any fanless cards on the bench. There must be many of us who use PC's for music recording and production and demand silent systems. Getting a heads-up on new fanless (heatsink-only) cards would be very useful to the likes of us..
Got myself an ASUS GTX460 1gb today, great card so far, even if SmartDoctor is pretty crap compared to utilities such as EVGAPrecision.
Extremely quiet fan, idles at ~30c, got up 60c running Metro2033 Dx11 on high.
So nice to have a smaller card then my old GTX260 as well, was always a mission to squeeze it in.
Useful article, thank you.
Just as I decide to buy a GTX 460 and start wondering which incarnation of it to buy, you publish this article. Great timing! Thanks!!
If i was in the position to buy a 460 then it would have to be ASUS.
hmm why are all these cards only showing shaders @224 inified i have the zotac card and it shows shaders @336 unified and lucking at some web site that have Reviewed the card report the same ???