On The Bench: EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW

Test System And Benchmarks

We’re including a number of cards in our benchmarks. From AMD, we have the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870. From Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 460 and 470, in addition to EVGA’s factory overclocked GTX460 FTW, of course.

As described in our Radeon HD 6800 launch article, the majority of GeForce GTX 460 cards on the market are at least slightly overclocked beyond the reference specification. To make sure the benchmarks reflect what's available for purchase, we averaged out the clocks for the seven cheapest models we could find for a fair representation of the GeForce GTX 460 playing field. As a result, we are benchmarking the GeForce GTX 460 1 GB at 708/1416 MHz core/shader speeds for our tests, a 33 MHz increase over the original reference core clock. This increase is so low that, frankly, it will probably have no measurable impact on our results. It does seem like the fair thing to do, though. The memory runs at the reference 900 MHz GDDR5 clock, as even overclocked models tend to leave memory at reference speeds.

It's also worth noting that most Radeon HD 6870s currently available ship at reference clock rates. There are a handful of 13 and 20 MHz speed bumps, and a couple of 40 MHz increases that command higher prices. However, for the folks ready to hit the comments section with, "Sure, compare overclocked Nvidia hardware to stock AMD cards," bear in mind that this is representative of today's retail landscape.