GTX 460 launched today

They make noise, too.

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Tzupy
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GTX 460 launched today

Post by Tzupy » Mon Jul 12, 2010 4:43 am


faugusztin
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Post by faugusztin » Mon Jul 12, 2010 6:34 am

It has one very serious flaw - zero compatibility with aftermarket coolers. Looking at the picture, you can see that holes are not in square. but are positioned in rectangle (one side is longer than the other). So unless you are lucky with your choice of stock cooler, then you will have hard time silencing it - at least for some time.

RaptorZX3
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Post by RaptorZX3 » Mon Jul 12, 2010 11:53 am

i must say the 460 GTX seem to take a lot less power than the 465 GTX.

But i agree, it's a flaw not being able to use aftermarket coolers on it, but so far the stock coolers are not that bad, the fan keeps itself at 35% when the video card is not needed.

Bobert
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Post by Bobert » Tue Jul 13, 2010 9:26 am

Idle power consumption for the MSI GTX 460 Cyclone OC is very good for the performance. Be nice to see how other GTX 460 cards compare.

Image

shleepy
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Post by shleepy » Tue Jul 13, 2010 10:11 am

Seems like an interesting HD 5850 competitor, finally.

I agree with the concerns about aftermarket cooling, but:
1) I would imagine that some very decent non-reference models with quiet coolers will become available soon enough. Or at least, good candidates for taking off the shroud and strapping on a 120mm fan.
2) Thermalright or some other company will release compatibility kits or special versions of heatsinks soon enough. They'll probably be way overpriced, but better than nothing.

kater
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Post by kater » Tue Jul 13, 2010 10:25 am

Unless & until SPCR reviews a generic 460 or a 460 with a proprietary cooler (say selected Palit, GB, Asus) we can only hope that the "very very silent" operation claimed by numerous reviewers does account for something. But given the cards specs it does.

Facts so far:
- Zotac blower IS loud. If a reviewer like "M@dH4xXxorRedOCer_" claims it is noisy, then it is noisy. And they claim so.
- Mounting holes - strange idea, but hopefully can be handled, either by kits or customization.
- Lotsa cards come with factory soft for OCing and generally messing with settings (fan, voltage). Could be used for slowing down the fan, at least in idle. And given the low low power consumption of these, it should be easily doable and pose no threat.

Hopes:
The GB Windfart (or Windforce, or sth like that...) seems v quiet. Dual fans, smart soft - could be a treat. Asus versions also seem OK as they let you mess with volts. Also, maybe AC will also supply some decent coolers to manufacturers.

As for me - as soon as they come up with a "green" 460 with a single 6-pin PCI-E, I'm in. I like the idle power cons, I like the OC potential, size and the general clout the card has. As long as the card will be next to silent, or v v quiet in idle, I'll hit it. Lets just wait a little until prices settle and we'll be OK. Well, at least ppl outside Europe will be OK, as here we have this great 1 USD = 1 EUR rate :( (and VAT to boot...)

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Post by ilovejedd » Tue Jul 13, 2010 12:15 pm

Wow, 40W idle for the GTS 250 1GB? Where was the chart from? I've got a Biostar TH55B HD+Core i7-860+ECS GTS 250 512MB (738MHz)+Antec EA380-D build and system power consumption at idle from the wall is 60W. Assuming power supply efficiency at that load is 80%, that means a DC load of 48W. I find it hard to believe that the rest of my system is pulling a mere 8W...

faugusztin
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Post by faugusztin » Tue Jul 13, 2010 12:28 pm

kater wrote:Also, maybe AC will also supply some decent coolers to manufacturers.
Actually :
http://www.techpowerup.com/126437/ECS_A ... _Card.html

But ECS as brand belongs to "do not trust" category.

ilovejedd
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Post by ilovejedd » Tue Jul 13, 2010 12:51 pm

faugusztin wrote:But ECS as brand belongs to "do not trust" category.
Normally, I wouldn't, but I needed a faster GPU for PCSX2 (PS2 emulator) and the ECS was the cheapest I found ($110 w/o rebates). I was looking at the HD 5750 but there weren't any good deals at the time.

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Post by CA_Steve » Tue Jul 13, 2010 1:03 pm

HT4U's review of the MSI cyclone cooler.

RaptorZX3
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Post by RaptorZX3 » Tue Jul 13, 2010 1:12 pm

kater wrote:as soon as they come up with a "green" 460 with a single 6-pin PCI-E, I'm in. I like the idle power cons, I like the OC potential, size and the general clout the card has.
That's why i actually like my eVGA Geforce GTS 250 512mb: Stock cooler is efficient and silent enough for me, it only require 1 x 6pins PCIe connector, and this connector is located on the side of the card, not at the end of it.

for general info, the eVGA GTS 250 model number i have is "512-P3-1150-TR". For some reason, the newer revisions of this card (like the "1153-TR") have a slightly slower GPU clock, and there's no mention for my card being overclocked anywhere, maybe they just failed mentioning it on the GTS 250 models...

flexium
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Post by flexium » Wed Jul 14, 2010 11:58 am

I am going to get one of these for sure. The question is which one to get.

I am sure the performance are similar but which one is the most silent???

kater
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Post by kater » Mon Jul 19, 2010 1:30 pm

Regarding the dreaded mounting holes issue - Gainward/Palit have come up with a custom PCB with "square" holes. See Xbit Labs for details.

Flexium - if the GB Windforce is able to slow down in 2D then this would be the GTX460 to get. Alas, I've read on a forum somewhere that these particular cards do not ramp up/down their dual fans. The only review of the Windforce model (guru3d) is soooo retarder and does not even give a hint of what the card's fan can or can't do. They just simply go "the card is veeeery silent". And they don't even post idle power numbers. As per usual - better wait a few weeks until someone here speaks up on this.

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Wed Jul 21, 2010 7:41 pm

I just got my GTX 460 with the stock cooler. The reason I bought this is, with the stock cooler you know what you're getting. With any other card, you have to track down a review (assuming there is one), and hope they measured the noise.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814187113

I run a quiet aircooled system (Sonata III with 2x SCYTHE S-FLEX 1200RPM fans at 800rpm, Core 2 Duo 45nm 2.67). The only sound added to the case with my GTX 460 installed (at idle) is a soft swoosh of air.

It makes noise when you play games, but not as loud a noise as my old HD 4850. The heatsink and fan are really top-notch.

The only downside I can see right now is that most of these cards can't run the fan at less than 40%. Now, I understand the issues running a PWM fan down to 10 or 20%, but I'm surprised the limit is so high. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future with a BIOS hack - I'm happy with the noise level, but I'd love to try even lower speeds.

leila87
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Post by leila87 » Sat Jul 24, 2010 12:43 am

Hey, about to get one of these, but since now i have a thermalright hr3, i'm so worried i'll en up having an airplane... does anyone know if there are plans to release a heatsink alternative soon?

Big Pimp Daddy
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Post by Big Pimp Daddy » Sat Jul 24, 2010 10:12 am

Hmm, I must be missing something...

In comparing the GTX 460 (1GB) to the 5850, I don't see much competition;

GTX 460 (1GB) has between 1 and 5 watts lower idle power, a couple of degrees lower temperatures and comes out ahead in maybe 1% of game benchmarks.

5850 has between 7 and 20 watts lower load power consumption, better performance in 99% of benchmarks, and costs 5% more. Also, eyefinity. And standard mounting holes for aftermarket heatsinks.

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Post by CA_Steve » Sat Jul 24, 2010 4:53 pm

Big Pimp Daddy wrote:Hmm, I must be missing something...
NVidia is preferred over ATI for gpu acceleration in many non-gaming app. I pay a 20-30W idle power tax with my 5770 due to ATI's wacky two monitor implementation. Don't know if NVidia does that.

Wait a few months and there will be other cooling solutions.

<shrugs> multiple choices in the mkt is a good thing. Mixed bag whether one is better than the other.

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Sun Jul 25, 2010 4:42 am

Big Pimp Daddy wrote:Hmm, I must be missing something...

In comparing the GTX 460 (1GB) to the 5850, I don't see much competition;

GTX 460 (1GB) has between 1 and 5 watts lower idle power, a couple of degrees lower temperatures and comes out ahead in maybe 1% of game benchmarks.

5850 has between 7 and 20 watts lower load power consumption, better performance in 99% of benchmarks, and costs 5% more. Also, eyefinity. And standard mounting holes for aftermarket heatsinks.
As-of last week, the difference in price was 25%, and the difference in performance was 12%. Also, the GTX 460 is only 8.25 inches, which is shorter than my HD 4850 - the HD 5850 and 5830, at 9.5 inches, cannot fit in my case. Basically, I really wanted the 5850 from the moment it was released, but ATI did not design the card with my Sonata III in mind. The fact that the GTX 460 has the exact same PCB specs (8 memory chips, 256-bit bus) minus 1.25 inches just shows that ATI was being lazy.

There is only one sign of competition from ATI, and that's a single 40$-off XFX deal that ends today. There are no across-the-board price cuts, so the boards are still priced at $280 and above.

If the boards come down to $250, they will be competitive. But the GTX 460 will still have a size advantage.

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Post by Cryoburner » Sun Jul 25, 2010 8:41 am

Big Pimp Daddy wrote: As-of last week, the difference in price was 25%, and the difference in performance was 12%.
Saying the difference in performance is 12% is a bit of a misnomer. Even according to that page, it depends a lot on the resolution you'll be running games at. At the highest resolution tested, 2560x1600, where the video card makes the most difference in performance, the 5850 performed 23% better in their tests. Since framerates at higher resolutions tend to be lower, this should be a very noticeable difference.

At low resolutions, the framerates with these cards get up to levels higher than can be displayed on a monitor with most of the games tested. In some cases, like Company of Heroes and Far Cry, the framerates exceeded 400 fps at lower resolutions, and the results at all resolutions were much higher than could appear on-screen. In Far Cry, a six year old game, the 460 actually got higher framerates than the 5850 at all tested resolutions. Results like those should be ignored though, as monitors can't display those extra frames, and even if one could, the difference would be imperceptible. A sub-$50 video card would handle such games equally well.

Tuning a card for better performance at framerates higher than can be displayed is a largely useless endeavor, but that doesn't keep TechPowerUp from integrating those results into their final averages. It's great to see them continuing to include older games in their tests, but including the performance of such games in their performance summary makes their final averages somewhat deceptive. They really shouldn't even include such summary graphs, as many people will simply refer to that page rather than reading through the results for individual games, and won't realize that the results are thrown off by many games with higher than displayable framerates. This also affects their performance per watt and performance per dollar graphs, shifting them in favor of the 460.

I also find it a notable oversight that while they include many games that share the same graphics engines, including a number of older titles, they don't include a single game using Valve's Source Engine. Many of the most popular PC games of recent years use Source, so its complete omission is rather odd, considering the huge number of games they tested. If they're going to post a generalized summary of performance in games, they should at least attempt to make sure what they're testing is relevant.

The GTX 460 does seem to be a decent card, but it's not really a direct competitor to the HD 5850. It offers real-world performance more comparable to the 5830, with some exceptions. The price of the 5830 1GB has dropped to around the price of the GTX 460 768MB, so both remain competitively priced. The HD 5850 is competing more with the GTX 470 than the 460 though, and both of those cards carry a price premium over their upper mid range counterparts.

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Post by ntavlas » Sun Jul 25, 2010 8:53 am

I like the gtx 460 so far and it could be my next card. Over here the difference in price is more than 25% compared to the 5850 which gives it a better price/performance ratio.

Some observations: the stock cooler looks like a good candidate for a fan swap: if it manages to cool the card quietly out of the box, it`s almost guaranteed that with a custom, quiet fan it will be inaudible when idle.

I also like the fact that it has a smaller pcb. Right now this makes it the most powerful card that will fit in my custom mini itx case, originally designed around the hd5770. I also suspect that the space efficient pcb helps in regard to power consumption.

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Post by SimplexPL » Sun Jul 25, 2010 10:37 am

Could someone recommend a silent GTX460 1GB? I already got burnt on Palit Sonic - the non-reference cooling has no heatpipes and no Cu (just aluminum). As a result the temperature under load quickly goes above 70 degrees Centigrate and the fanspeed goes well above 50% and is very noisy - this card is basically only silent when its idle with fanspeed of 40%, anything above that is clearly audible and intoleralbly loud for me. And that's after a bios update - before that it was even worse (43% fanspeed in idle which would immediately ramp up even if you started a divx movie).

I am returning palit and I was thinking about replacing it with another card. In the store I have a choice of Gigabyte OC, Gainward GS (not GLH) and Asus DirectCU (not TOP) - sadly, they all have non-reference cooling.

Looking at tweaktown tests I notice that Gigabyte is as loud in idle as under load, which does not bode well:
tweaktown.com/reviews/3393/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_460_1gb_oc_video_card/index17.html

However, in newegg customer reviews many people claim it is silent.
newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125333

Also, guru3d thinks the card is silent:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/13
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 768MB - The cooling design is excellent. It allows the card to come pre-overclocked yet keeps the card incredibly silent yet within very lovely noise levels, as you cannot hear this card whatsoever. Even overclocked this card will amaze you in both cooling performance and noise levels (in a positive fashion of course).

Gainward solution is supposed to be cool according to some reviews, but I stopped trusting it because Palit Sonic was also supposed to be quiet:

xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/nvidia-geforce-gtx-460_6.html#sect0

fudzilla.com/reviews/reviews/reviews/gainward-gtx-460-gs-goes-like-hell-tested/page-11

I don't know anything about ASUS solution.
Last edited by SimplexPL on Mon Jul 26, 2010 1:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

lutel
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Post by lutel » Sun Jul 25, 2010 12:13 pm

I guess most silent of GTX 460 will be one of these two:

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX460 768MB
or
MSI GTX 460 Cyclone 768MB

It is my assumption based on reviews and cooler design, take a look at this:

www dot tweaktown dot com/reviews/3393/gigabyte_geforce_gtx_460_1gb_oc_video_card/index17.html
www dot guru3d dot com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/13

I hope we will get decent review on SPCR soon :)

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Post by Cerb » Sun Jul 25, 2010 12:20 pm

I'll have to bite the bullet before then, but I know I'm not the only one torn between the two (leaning toward MSI for probably lower idle, but GB's is $5 cheaper, and a mini-HDMI->DVI would be a useful adapter). It looks like the GB might be quieter under load, but the sites reviewing so far have poor testing methods, and/or very high noise floors. Techpowerup's seems OK, but only tested the MSI 768, while the GB was 1024.

AT's are, again, OK (very good, outside of specifically testing quiet components for their quietness), but they haven't tested either card in question. Their dBA results I would trust, if they did all three in the same test environment.

A direct acoustic noise comparison between the reference cooler, GB's two-fan, and MSI's bigger non-shrouded cooler, would be wonderful.

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Sun Jul 25, 2010 9:09 pm

Just get a board with the reference cooler like I did. It's a 2 heatpipe axial cooler seated in the center of the board, with a nondescript black shroud. Here is a picture of one:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Axle ... ntents.jpg

The noise level is literally in the floor, and it doesn't rise much at-all under load because the fan at 40% is already enough to keep the temperature below 60C. My fan doesn't even spin-up during normal gaming. See how the fan noise hardly rises at all?

Here are some models with the reference cooler:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814187113
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130563
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814127511

SimplexPL
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Post by SimplexPL » Sun Jul 25, 2010 11:41 pm

I'd like to buy a reference design, but I live in Poland and ironically it's hard to get the reference-cooler cards here (at least where I live, and I want to buy it in a brick and mortar store so that I can quickly return it if the noise level is too high).
That's why I am currently limited to Gainward GS, Gigabyte OC and Asus DirectCU.

Cerb
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Post by Cerb » Mon Jul 26, 2010 12:14 pm

defaultluser wrote:The noise level is literally in the floor, and it doesn't rise much at-all under load because the fan at 40% is already enough to keep the temperature below 60C. My fan doesn't even spin-up during normal gaming. See how the fan noise hardly rises at all?
...for that review. Others have different dBA increases. If Techpowerup were to test others, I would trust their methodology, in comparing which is quieter. However, actual increase in noise varies enough by review, and shouldn't (IE, one testing method closer to the card should make for 40-42dBA, instead of 27-29dBA: both +2dBA).

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Post by SimplexPL » Mon Jul 26, 2010 1:07 pm

I tried to ascertain whether GTX460 is as silent as the reviews at Guru3d and tweaktown claim.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/13
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 768MB - The cooling design is excellent. It allows the card to come pre-overclocked yet keeps the card incredibly silent yet within very lovely noise levels, as you cannot hear this card whatsoever. Even overclocked this card will amaze you in both cooling performance and noise levels (in a positive fashion of course).

I found the topic at HardOCP forum and discussed with an owner there (he even made a homemade recording of the noise):
www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1533153&page=3 (continues over pages 3, 4 ,5)

I still don't know what to think, but I am cautiously optimistic.

Cerb
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Post by Cerb » Mon Jul 26, 2010 4:19 pm

Hmm. Combined with the mini-HDMI->DVI adapter (who has spare mini-HDMI->HDMI cables hanging around?), and the same price as reference ones...at worst, it looks like a good choice to wait for aftermarket coolers with.

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Mon Jul 26, 2010 6:25 pm

Cerb wrote:Hmm. Combined with the mini-HDMI->DVI adapter (who has spare mini-HDMI->HDMI cables hanging around?), and the same price as reference ones...at worst, it looks like a good choice to wait for aftermarket coolers with.
Well now, do you seriously think they would leave you hanging like that? My Sparkle GTX 460 came in a very spare container with no frills, but they still provided a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable. Also included were two molex to PCIe power adapters.

defaultluser
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Post by defaultluser » Mon Jul 26, 2010 6:31 pm

SimplexPL wrote:I tried to ascertain whether GTX460 is as silent as the reviews at Guru3d and tweaktown claim.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-460-review/13
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 768MB - The cooling design is excellent. It allows the card to come pre-overclocked yet keeps the card incredibly silent yet within very lovely noise levels, as you cannot hear this card whatsoever. Even overclocked this card will amaze you in both cooling performance and noise levels (in a positive fashion of course).

I found the topic at HardOCP forum and discussed with an owner there (he even made a homemade recording of the noise):
www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1533153&page=3 (continues over pages 3, 4 ,5)

I still don't know what to think, but I am cautiously optimistic.
I'm actually in many of the discussions over at the [H]. According to reviewers from that site (posted within threads), the reference cooler is the quietest they tested. In fact, one reviewer was amazed that so many companies were going with 3rd-party fans, because the stock cooler was so impressive. I'd link the thread, but the forums are down right this moment.

I can't hear the reference cooler over my stock Intel heatsink/fan at idle, and that should tell you something. The fan continues to spin at that RPM during games, which means the only increase in noise comes from the processor fan. This thing is so quiet that I'm tempted to get a better CPU cooler just to see how low it goes :D

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