Final words and conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
You know, the dilemma of the graphics card tested today is not the product itself, it's the SE classification and pricing. When you see SE you think "Special Edition", but in fact that branding works the other way around as it is a castrated GTX 460 that is clocked down slightly, but does come with 1024 MB.
Now don't get me wrong here, the overall baseline performance of the GeForce GTX 460 SE remains quite decent, this Zotac card comes factory overclocked a little bit higher as well. So really, performance wise you'll have nothing to complain about in this mid-range segment, pretty much any game up-to say 1600x1200 and even 1920x1200 will run quite fine with a decent set of image quality preferences enabled.
What keeps surprising us is the tremendous overclocking potential on the GF104 based GPUs, pretty much any and every one of these cards we've tested to date has shown a lot of reserve and room for overclocking, and they scale really well while doing so.
So yeah, let's round things up. Unfortunately the SE (Special Edition) branding is I'm afraid nothing more than a sales stunt to bamboozle the novice consumer in the stores. That "SE" tag will confuse you and make you believe that it is a better product than say the regular GTX 460 with 1024MB, and that's just not the case. In fact an SE edition is fighting with the 768MB version, so its the world upside down rally.
That by itself doesn't make it bad product, the SE series do perform at roughly GTX 460 level, it forfeits on the GPU intensive games due to lacking shader processors, but wins a little on the fill rate / memory side of things due to its full GB of graphics memory. And sure, it does overclock really well. That 800+ MHz clock frequency did surprise us and does bring in a nice chunk of extra game performance.
ZOTAC delivers the product with with some software premiums and the product does come with an extended 5 year warranty (registration required within 14 days after purchase).
So the honest truth, there is nothing wrong with the product all by itself except that it's priced too far out of its league. In the end for the same money you'd need to go for the regular GTX 460 with 1024MB of memory as it is the faster and thus better solution, period. But once prices come down to say 125 EUR, yeah that where these cards would offer great value, especially when you tweak a little.
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