This card will be app. 10% more expensive than the 1 GB reference design. With a 20% performance gain the price increase is more than justified. When overclocked manually, the Palit GTX 460 Sonic Platinum reaches about the same speed as a reference design card, so for people who want to OC the card maually this might be a better choice. The reviewer had an issue with the fan blades that broke off very easily. This card almost reaches the GTX 470 performance levels, at a lower price.

Overclocking:

The overclocks of our card are 850 MHz GPU core (6% gain) and 1090 MHz Memory (9% gain). This is on top of the overclocked settings out of the box which already are 19% for the GPU core and 11% for the memory .

All GTX 460 cards in this test have app. the same maximum overclock, no matter if it was factory overclocked or if it was based on the reference card.

Benchmarks:

Temperatures, Fan Noise, Performance per watt, price performance, Power Consumption, 3D Mark 2003, 3D Mark 2005, 3D Mark 2006, BattleForge, Call of Duty 4, Call of Juarez 2, Company Of Heroes, Crysis, Dawn of War 2, DiRT 2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Far Cry, Far Cry 2, H.A.W.X, Metro 2033, Prey, Quake 4, Riddick: Dark Athena, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky, Unigine Heaven 2.0, Unreal Tournament 3, World In Conflict.

Compared to:

GeForce GTX

• 275 896MB
• 280 1024MB
• 285 1024MB
• 460 1024MB
• 460 768MB
• 465 1024MB
• 470 1024MB
• 480 1024MB

ATI Radeon HD

• 4870 512MB
• 4890 1024MB
• 5770 1024MB
• 5830 1024MB
• 5850 1024MB
• 5870 1024MB

Test Setup:

• HDD : Western Digiutal Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
• Mainboard : Gigabyte GA-X58-Extreme
• Memory : 3x2GB DDR3 Mushkin Redline XP3-12800
• Monitor : LG Flatron W3000H 30 inch
• OS : Windows 7 x64
• Processor : Intel Core i7 920
• PSU : akasa 1200W