The Nvidia GTX460 1024MB is an excellent little card. It's what the GTX465 should have been from the start, both performance wise and in terms of power consumption. It's no surprise that Nvidia are banking on this card being successful after the fiasco that hit the higher end Fermi cards on release. Thankfully for them, they have created a solution that will not only provide tough competition for ATI but is set to dominate the mainstream market.

First off, we analysed the performance difference between the GTX460 and the GTX465. Throughout the tests, the GTX460 lead by an average of 5-10% and in some cases such as in Quake Wars and DIRT 2, the performance gap ended up much higher. Overclocking both cards reduced the performance difference but not enough to take the winner's title away from the GF104 based GTX460. This is mainly due to the architectural tweaks that Nvidia made to their new mainstream orientated core. Despite it missing 16 CUDA processors, each of the 7 stream multi-processors in the GF104 chip boasts 8 texture units instead of 4, giving a total of 56 for a higher fill rate and shader operation. Additionally a core clock bump proves to be beneficial to the GTX460 over the GTX465. The other advantages of the GTX460 includes a very high overclocking headroom without the need for voltage tweaking, much lower power consumption and most importantly, a lower price point. Given that the Zotac GTX460 was pitted against the more expensive MSI GTX465 with voltage control, it impressed me to see the numerous advantages it held over its bigger brother. The only downside of the GF104 chip was its lower tessellation performance but this was not a disastrous shortcoming.



The real question is whether Nvidia can wade off competition from ATI? The answer is not clear cut, as is usually the case in these situations. Nonetheless the GTX460 does very well competing against the HD5850, which we have to remember is in a price bracket above it. The only tests where the ATI card has a clear lead is Crysis Warhead, Resident Evil 5, Quake Wars, Battlefield Bad Company 2 and 3DMark Vantage. The GTX460 is distinctively the better card in Far Cry 2, Unreal Tournament 3 and the DX11 Unigine Benchmark. In the other tests, the winner depends mostly on the settings used or whether the cards are overclocked such as Street Fighter IV where the ATI card loses out at the lower resolution, or in DIRT 2 where the GTX460 fares better when both are overclocked. Overall it's hard to argue against the HD5850 being the superior card but there are many other factors to take into consideration. In our review, the cards used were from Zotac and ASUS, the latter being £80 more expensive and pre-overclocked. In that scenario, the GTX460 looks provide the best value for money. On the other hand, if we solely look at the GPUs and their cheapest offerings, there is a £30 difference. Based on that, the choice would be much harder as they both will provide similar bang for the buck. This is somewhat of a strange scenario because it means both cards can co-existed and appeal to people with different budgets. I have to also note that the GTX460 responds much better to overclocking than the HD5850, often reducing the performance deficit it had in the above mentioned games. So against a non voltage modified HD5850, the GTX460 looks even more appealing. In reality, a HD5830 would have been a better card to compare it against but without a sample to test against, we couldn't get any more results.

So far we've only focussed on the GPU itself rather than the manufacturer. Being a reference model, there's not a lot of extras that Zotac bundle. Prince Of Persia and a lengthy 5 year warranty are the main attractions of this card but other than that, there is little to get excited about. Unfortunately, the cooler wasn't adequate enough for cooling and noise was an issue during gameplay. Its price is also higher than other manufacturers' offering that often come with custom coolers and/or pre-overclocked.


+ Good performance
+ Support for PhysX and CUDA
+ Stable and high overclocking headroom
+ Well packaged
+ Excellent price (GTX460s in general)
+ 5 Years warranty
+ Free bundled game
+ Good tessellation performance
+ Low power consumption


- High temperatures
- Zotac's solution could be cheaper

I award Nvidia's GeForce GTX460 1024MB the new Vortez accolade for Amazing Value.