The GTX460 revered to be an excellent overclocker right from release and it didn't disappoint. Armed with MSI's Afterburner application, all I had to do was slide the settings to the desired clocks. Since there are no voltage tweaking support on the Zotac, no other settings had to be configured. The default voltage for this particular card was 1.0120V. In the end, the Zotac GTX460 achieved 830MHz on the core from the default 675MHz, and the memory easily reached 4000MHz over the stock 3600MHz. The memory reached the speed rated by Samsung. The shader clock speed remained synchronous with the core speed on a 1:2 ratio.


Stock


Overclocked
The 155MHz overclock on the core represents a 23% increase and the memory overclock is a lower 11% increase which is reflected in the memory bandwidth gain. The 23% core clock speed advantage results in a similar performance increase in pixel and texture fill rate.

Temperature


Temperature was definitely not the Zotac GTX460's strong point. At stock speed, the reference cooler idled with a delta temperature value of 30C, higher than the other two GPUs tested granted they had custom coolers. Overclocking had minimal impact of the idle temperatures thanks to the 2D core clock remaining the same at 405MHz.

Under full load using MSI Kombustor, the fan struggles to tame the temperatures. At stock clocks, the fan ramps up to 64% speed and keeps the delta value at 65C which in this case was a real world temperature of 92C. Overclocking didn't help matters and despite setting the fan to the maximum possible speed of 70%, the delta value rose by 5C.

Noise

Spinning at around 40% under idle conditions, the Zotac GTX460 remains fairly quiet. When placed under load, the fan speed increases to 64% and 70% for stock and overclocked speeds respectively. Those were definitely audible above the case fans and even during intense gameplay on Battlefield Bad Company 2. It seems that for this reason, Zotac have decided to limit the maximum fan speed to 70% so it couldn't be turned up for overclocking purposes. For the perfect balance between noise and temperature, MSI's Afterburner can be used to create fan profiles.