ECS GTX 460 Black Review

ccokeman - September 9, 2010
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Testing:

Testing of the ECS Black Series GTX 460 will consist of running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where it falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA control panel. I will test the card at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see how much additional performance is available and to determine if it can run with the current fastest single GPU cards on the market. The drivers used in this test will be the 10.4 Catalyst drivers for ATI and 258.96 Forceware drivers from NVIDIA for the GTX 480, 470, 465 and GTX 460. Tests will be conducted at both stock and overclocked settings to gauge performance when an increase in clock speed is applied.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6Ghz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card(s): ECS Black GTX 460 1GB
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Cooler Master Stacker 810

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

ECS Black Series GTX 460 885/1770/1078MHz

I was pleasantly surprised that the ECS Black series GTX 460 had some overclocking chops. While it fell a little short of the 900/1800Mhz core clock speeds that the last two GTX 460 cards reviewed by OCC have reached (885/1770Mhz). It did however blow them away on the memory side with the highest memory overclock on one of NVIDIA's FERMI variants that I have been able to reach at 1078Mhz (2156Mhz effective). The core speed increase of 120Mhz is close to a 16% improvement over the factory default clock speed of 765Mhz while the memory makes a huge 153Mhz jump over the stock 925Mhz. This equates to a 16.5% increase in speed. To reach these results I used MSI's Afterburner utility and used a voltage increase to 1087mv on the "core". This did not necessarily help the memory but did help out with stability on the CUDA cores. While your overclock on this card may vary either higher or lower, this was what was achievable on this specific card. The Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro cooling does not hurt the situation as it delivered load temperatures of only 62 degrees Celsius with no noise. A plus in this world of exceptionally loud reference cooling solutions! Even so, all of this boils down to an increase in performance for just a modest time commitment on your part.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Each card has been tested for its maximum stable clock speeds using MSI's Kombuster utility. So far my testing has shown that higher clock speeds may be stable in games where GPU usage does not reach 100%, but will crash within a few minutes using this utility. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15 minute test at 1920 x 1200 and 8x AA.