Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
Very little negative can be said about the GeForce GTX 460 768MB setup in SLI. In previous articles we have shown you guys already that the performance scaling of two GPUs is something the GTX 400 series is really good at. It was just that heat, noise and power consumptions became a constant nag. And that's just not the case with the excellent GF104 based GeForce GTX 460 cards.
With the more GPU stringent resolutions and modern games you can quite easily gain 1.8x ~ 1.9x performance with two of these 200 USD cards. At a grand total of 400 USD that is mighty impressive to observe, in fact in this solution most of the time you will be even much faster than the mighty hot and noisy GeForce GTX 480. Obviously that statement remains relative as the GTX 480 will be much stronger in situations that require more frame buffer and memory bandwidth. Examples here are anything above 8xAA and say a gaming resolution of 2560x1600. But if you are a gamer with a monitor resolution up-to 1920x1200 and you think that 4xAA or 8xAA is fine, then you fall within 99.98% of the people that could be on the lookout for a solution like this. Unfortunately NVIDIA SLI solutions have one negative .. to be able to operate two or more cards in SLI mode you'll need a SLI certified motherboard. Please keep this in mind at all times though, most X58 motherboards are SLI certified, and some P55 motherboards as well. That or an nForce motherboard (which is a dying breed). But carefully make sure and check that out before opting for SLI.
Scaling wise things can not get any better, there was a good reason for including the R5830 setup in Crossfire in this article, it is the direct competitor to the GeForce GTX 460 768MB and it has a little more memory. Still NVIDIA won in pretty much any scenario when we look at pure and raw unadulterated performance scaling. But make no mistake, Crossfire has gotten so much better and is still getting better and better with each quarter of the year that passes. Especially with the help of the new CrossfireX profile patches things really look much better and games get supported more quickly.
In the end though it's all about your bucks and preference, all we can say is that we enjoyed testing these two cards in SLI. We have not seen any driver issues, no weird stuff and neither did we had to configure anything. Everything worked straight out of the box with near perfect scaling. As such if you are interested in admirable SLI scaling performance and are gaming with a limited budget, then look no further .. for 400 USD you get to have a grand amount of DX11 compatible gaming performance that will last you a long time. We'll have SLI results with the GTX 460 1024MB models up soon as well.
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