Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SOC review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

From the top of my head I can tell you that this was GeForce GTX 460 card number eighteen that we have tested to date. The overall baseline performance of the GeForce GTX 460 is of course commendable, this particular SOC card comes factory overclocked a good chunk higher, making it the fastest GTX 460 we actually tested. The card as tested today performs roughly at GTX 470 level, and that means it is in fact competing with the Radeon 6850 and sometimes even the 6870.

It doesn't stop there though, you can really benefit from a manual overclock as well thanks to the cooler. 850 MHz is just not an issue either and thanks to the very silent WindForce 2X cooler the temperatures remain very much under control. Now if you are willing to do so, add a little extra GPU voltage as shown on our overclocking pages, if you set it at 1.088 Volts you'll pass 900 MHz. Our maximum upper limit was roughly 950 MHz, and that was really pushing it. So let's take 900 MHz as the recommended overclock under the assumption you have a proper ventilated chassis and add GPU voltage, which is supported by Gigabyte's own OC tool or you can just use AfterBurner really...

Performance wise you'll have nothing to complain about, pretty much any game up-to 1920x1200 will run just fine with a fairly decent set of image quality preferences enabled.

At this point we have tested no less than eighteen GeForce GTX 460 class cards, and this card again is something special, it manages to impress us very much.

Now there's something I need to say here. When we started testing the GeForce 460 SOC we noticed a lot of similarities towards some products from the competition. See, what Gigabyte did was to take a good look at MSI's HAWK products features wise, then they took pretty much all MSI's ideas. Gigabyte even took it a step further, at application level they copied a very similar to MSI AfterBurner looking layout to OCGuru. We strongly like to recommend Gigabyte to remain focused and original with their own ideas, and not 'borrow' them from MSI so much as that is far from original and professional.

Anyway that said, a card like this allows you to play any game to date with high image quality settings up-to 1600x1200 and in most scenarios 1920x1200 as well. At this price level, that is just really good overall value.

The GTX 460 remains affordable, offers a nice chunk of gaming performance that stretches itself to the preferred 1920x1200 monitor resolution. With the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 Super Overclock edition it's all positive really, no need for a long and extensive conclusion. It is the fastest factory clocked GTX 460 1024MB model we've spotted on the market to date. If you can find it at the right price, then go for it as we would very much like to recommend it, even if it is for sheer silence and cooling performance alone. The product can be found for 219 USD / 215 EUR in stores as we speak.

Very much recommended.

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