ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB Black Video Card Review

The ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB Black video card is a fun little card with the solid price/performance ratio from the GTX 460 series cards with an ultra efficient heatsink and a hefty factory overclock. When overclocked up to a 900 MHz core speed the GTX 460 1GB begins to close in on the performance of a GTX 470 (the factory overclock itself puts it above the GTX 465) and well above cards from the Radeon side of the fence for a lower price. The heatsink uses 92mm fans (with unrestrictive aluminum fins and a plastic shroud) which are dead silent at an idle state and not audible over even just the pump from the Corsair H50.

The added height of the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro has to be the only downside of this card that I can think of, next to its power consumption (you don’t expect higher tessellation performance for free do you?). For users that are used to double-slot reference heatsinks this is tall, but there are other heatsinks which are actually quad-slot which makes SLI close to impossible on any motherboard. As long as your motherboard has at least two slots between the PCIe x16 slots that you intend to use, there is enough room for two of these cards to fit and breathe- like on a board as shown here. I put in another video card (GeForce GTS 250) below this GTX 460 to see how and if it would be choked, and depending on the angle you screw the expansion bays in you can have over a 1/4″ in between cards with my 890GPA-UD3H. In this configuration temperatures went up less than 10C degrees which is still significantly lower than the reference cooler.

The ECS GTX 460 1GB Black is set to be available for a street price of $254.99 plus shipping, which makes it about $25 more than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB reference designed video cards on Newegg. The ECS card comes with a hefty factory overclock and the Accelero heatsink which carries a $45 common price, so this card is $20 under priced just for its heatsink. The ECS 460 1GB also carries a 3-year limited warranty on parts and 2-years on labor, which will last through the entire next generation of NVIDIA cards which sweetens the deal even more!

Legit Bottom Line: The ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB Black Video Card is a very capable card with a hefty factory overclock and additional room to clock with its Accelero Twin Turbo Pro keeping it chilled. At the $254.99 price tag it is hard to say ‘no’ to this great option if you are looking at a graphics card of the now very popular GTX 460 variation.