Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB Graphics Card Review

Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB OC

Manufacturer: Gigabyte
UK Price (as reviewed): £207 (inc VAT) MSRP
US Price (as reviewed): Unknown
Suggested retailers (alphabetical order): Ebuyer, Overclockers.co.uk, Scan

Gigabyte chose to send us an overclocked version of the GTX 460 1GB, complete with a custom dual-fan cooler. The card is set to retail at what seems like a reasonable £207, given that a stock card is scheduled to retail at £199.

The cooler is based around two fans which are bolted to a large, two-heatpipe heatsink. The heatsink is larger than that of the stock cooler, so it should be able to shift more heat, with the fans positioned so that they blow down towards the PCB. This means that the RAM gets cooled effectively, but also that all the waste heat from the card gets dumped in your case.

The VRMs have a small dedicated heatsink which is good to see, and they shouldn’t have any problem keeping cool given the orientation of the fans.

The PCB appears to be identical to the stock PCB, though it is coloured in Gigabyte's traditional aqua blue rather than black. Sandwiched between the PCB and the cooler is the GF104 chip, which Gigabyte has overclocked. The core of the GPU runs at 715MHz (up from 675MHz) while the stream processors race along at 1,430MHz (up from 1,350MHz). Unfortunately though, Gigabyte hasn’t seen fit to bump the memory speeds, so the DRAM modules run at their usual 900MHz (3.6GHz effective).

The overclock may only be small, but the price premium is equally minuscule and includes the cost and fitting of the custom cooler. These factors makes the Gigabyte GTX 460 1GB OC look particularly good value, but we'll have to wait till we've tested it to know for sure.