ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB Black Video Card Review

For both Temperature and Power consumption load testing I fired up Furmark v1.8.2 in v1.7.0 mode for as long as it took to stabilize after a minimum three minutes. Idle was obtained after fresh boot and after all applications finished launching, again after a minimum three minutes. Version 1.7.0 mode was used because I have consistently had crashes with NVIDIA cards on stock fan profiles with v1.8.2, and the older mode burns in just as well and without crashing.

The Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro heatsink is a very efficient cooler, staying in the low 30s at idle and low 50s at load (Folding@Home in the mid 40s). The only card which ran colder (or even close to as cool) was the AXLE HD 5670 which has much less graphics power and an efficient Arctic Cooling heatsink itself!

Power consumption numbers for the ECS GTX 460 1GB are a little less pretty, drawing more power than the mix crossfire setup which has an additional card! The GTX 460 is actually very close in wattage to the GTX 260-216, which was found to be pulling about the same power as the mix-fire, though the GTX 460 features much more horsepower than the 260.