The GIGABYTE card is overclocked out of the box which seems to be quite a common occurrence with this model. The card has moved from the 675MHz / 1350MHz / 3600MHz QDR Core / CUDA / Memory clocks to a 715MHz / 1430MHz / 3600MHz setup.

Conclusion:

Due to the core on the GIGABYTE card being slightly lower when compared to the MSI one, we can see that its performance is almost identical. A few more MHz on the 768MB version and it's clear that it would outperform a 1GB model which was 20MHz lower. Of course, you can overclock the 1GB version and gain even more performance; it's a little disappointing that GIGABYTE opted for 715MHz. While it's a very impressive overclock, it would have been nice to see an extra 10 or so MHz on it.

The cooler on the GIGABYTE card looks strong and no doubt will perform better than the standard GTX 460 cooler. It's not the best GTX 460 cooler we've looked at, though, which is saying something since we've only looked at one other. The extra heat and noise coming from the card is something you wouldn't really notice as it's only a small difference.

Compared to:

• Sapphire HD 5850 1GB
• Gigabyte HD 5830 1GB
• Gainward GTX 470 1280MB
• Galaxy GTX 465
• MSI GTX 460

Test Setup:

• Processor: Intel Core i7-980X
• Air cooler Noctua-NH-U12P with a single fan
• Mainboard: ASRock X58 Extreme-3
• Memory: 6GB 2000MHz DDR3 PC16000
• PSU: Thermaltake 1500w
• OS: W7 Ultimate x64.

Benchmarks:

Fan Noise, Overall Performance, Power Consumption, Total Value, Badaboom, Batman: Arkham Aslyum, BattleForge, Company Of Heroes, Dark void, Darkest of Days, Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor, Far Cry 2, H.A.W.X, High Quality AA and AF, Resident Evil V, Sound Test, Temperature Test.