NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB and 1GB Video Card Reviews

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

When the GeForce GTX 460 showed up on the door step we figured that it was just another ‘Fermi’ card that was too hot to handle, but we were plesantly surprised by the video card. Not only were the thermal temperatures okay, but we found the GeForce GTX 460 1GB was actually faster than the GeForce GTX 465 in the majority of the benchmarks. How could this be? The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 has a bilinear texture filtering rate of 26.7 GigaTexels/sec and a total memory bandwidth of 102.6GB/s. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB has a bilinear texture filtering rate of 37.8 GigaTexels/sec and a total memory bandwidth of 115.2GB/s. This gives the card the slight edge in those two areas even though the GTX 460 has fewer CUDA cores and graphics processing clusters.

After using both the GeForce GTX 460 768MB and GeForce GTX 460 1GB the GeForce GTX 460 1GB is clearly the way to go for gamers. With most gamers running 1920×1080 or 1920×1200 resolutions the extra memory and increased bus speed is well worth the extra $30 MSRP. The GeForce GTX 460 1GB is also faster, cooler and less power hungry than the GeForce GTX 465 in our testing. This makes it the card of choice for anyone looking for an NVIDIA card under $300. After looking back at the benchmark performance numbers, we wouldn’t understand why anyone would want the GeForce GTX 465 over the GeForce GTX 460 from the gaming perspective. The GeForce GTX 460 1GB also soundly beat the ATI Radeon HD 5830, which is less expensive at $199. ATI has some competition now at the $200-$250 price point as NVIDIA has released a very competitive product here with the GTX 460! It is about time NVIDIA has released a video card that has managed to get us excited and that is a good thing. The back to school shopping season will be starting here soon and NVIDIA desperately needed to get a solid video card on the market.

We have a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB graphics cards that we are testing right now in SLI, so hang tight if you wanted to see SLI peformance numbers. We’ll bring that to you here shortly and from the benchmarks that we have run so far it looks really good.

Prices may vary depending on the region, but expected MSRPs for our GTX 400 GPUs as of GTX 460 launch are as follows:

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 – $499
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 – $329
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 – $249
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB – $229
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB – $199

Legit Bottom Line: If you are looking to spend $199-$229 for a video card the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 looks like it is the clear winner no matter how you look at it. It comes out ahead in the performance tests, has low temperatures and is energy efficient compared to other cards!